


how to become a barista in five easy steps

by earthbellamy (samssalvation)



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Barista Bellamy, Barista Clarke, Coffee Shops, F/M, Fluff, Love/Hate, anyway based on real life sorta, bc i'm a barista bitchesss, coffee shop AU, i literally had to maKE THAT A TAG, on AO3, there's no barista clarke tag did you know that???? why is there no barista clarke tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-07 17:02:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4271052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samssalvation/pseuds/earthbellamy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke is doing her drinks review.<br/>An asshole is supervising her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the customer is always right

"So you're the new girl, huh?"

The short Korean boy knocks out the used espresso grounds from his portafilter and tosses a damp dishtowel at the blonde girl, who just manages to finish tying off her apron before the towel smacks her in the chest. She catches it before it can fall to the ground, glancing at the boy to find that he has turned back to the latte he was working on. Once he slides it along to the waiting customer, he turns back to her and sticks out his hand. "I'm Monty."

"Clarke." She takes it after quickly throwing the towel over her shoulder. His grip is firm from wrenching the filters into place on the machine. "And yeah, I'm new. I just did my drinks training yesterday."

He cracks a wicked grin and pats the Synesso machine to his left. "Then be warned: she's finnicky today."

Before she can moderate her expression, Clarke cocks an eyebrow at him. "The machine's a she?"

He gives her a look like the question was unnecessary and clearly indicative of her lack of experience - which, she supposes, it is; she's only gotten to work five shifts since she was hired two weeks ago, and she's still figuring out the ropes. But he doesn't seem offended by it; if anything, he looks glad that she gave him an opportunity to explain. "Boats, guns, and cars are all girls. So's my Synesso. Do you want to know her name?"

"Not really."

"Elizabeth." He winks cheekily. "Named after one of the most powerful monarchs in English history."

Clarke nods slowly, wondering if he's expecting some sort of response - "Oh, Elizabeth? She looks like an Elizabeth." - but she's saved the awkward silence by Monty's laugh. He rinses out his milk pitcher and continues, "It wasn't my idea. I didn't even know what the Elizabethan Era was until we named her that - and by we, I really mean  _he_ , because it was just the one guy."

"What do you mean?" Clarke asks, interested despite herself. The whole naming idea is admittedly ridiculous, but now that there appears to be a story behind it, she wants to know more. Being the new recruit, she figures there's no harm in knowing as much as possible about her co-workers.

He pauses - although "pause" might be too strong a word, since he seems to be unable to actually stop moving - before he snags the towel from Clarke's shoulder and dries the pitcher, which he sets next to the espresso machine. "Haven't you met Bellamy yet?"

Clarke's confused, "Who?" is an answer in itself.

Another laugh. Monty appears to be in a perpetually good mood, which Clarke finds a relief. After working a full shift with the silent and somewhat-moody Miller a few days past, she's glad to see that Monty has joined the ranks of Clarke's Mental Checklist of Fun People to Work With. This list also includes the girl who trained her the first day - a beautiful Latina girl named Raven - as well as the two guys on her second shift, Wick and Lincoln.

Monty moves to hand her the towel again, but after a quick peek at the register, he motions her in its direction instead. "Take this customer first."

Clarke looks over to see a black-haired man leaning on the counter. His attention is fixed to the tatty paperback in his hands, but he sets it aside when Clarke steps up to the register. When he looks up, there's the flicker of a frown. There's an astonishing amount of freckles dusted across his nose, which is almost enough to distract Clarke from the clearly irked expression on his face. "Are you new? You look new. Are you sure you can handle this?"

Clarke looks down at the register en lieu of answering him, mostly because she's not sure how to respond to the half-confused, half-accusatory tone in his voice. After a few seconds, she decides that anyone with as little tact as to blurt that sort of thing out is also not worthy of hers. She turns back to him with a steely look. "If we're done stating the obvious, you could place an order. Or something."

His dark eyes widen. The motion practically shoves his looks down her throat. _He's hot, and he knows it_ , Clarke thinks. For some reason, the thought annoys her. 

The customer leans forward, just far enough to waver on the line of impropriety. "That doesn't sound like the good old customer-is-always-right attitude."

"I don't like to endorse bad manners," Clarke replies sharply. Her grip on the cash register is verging on dangerously tight.

Her comment causes him to grin, a flash of white teeth against tan skin. He cocks his head at her. "And so you use bad manners to discourage them?"

"Would you prefer water in a spray bottle?" Clarke gives him an overly-sweet smile. "We aim to please."

He stares at her for a moment, visibly trying to deconstruct her. Then he shrugs and leans back. "A medium dark for here should work well enough."

Clarke plugs in his order and goes to ask for his mode of payment, but he already has two dollar bills on the counter. She practically tears them as she shoves them into the register, trying to control her heartbeat, which is racing in anger. She keeps her cool for five seconds longer than it takes to make his coffee and slide it across the counter to him, then turns to Monty with wide eyes and pulls him aside.

Her hands might be shaking, from the anger and also, now, from shame. "You should have stopped me," Clarke hisses. "I don't know what happened - I just - He was so - "

But when she looks up from where she has twined her fingers together, Monty's got another grin on his face. He maintains his silence for an impressive three seconds before he shakes his head and says, "You'll get used to it."

Clarke's humiliation disappears at the promise of another interaction with the man. Her gaze goes out across the shop, but he's nowhere to be seen. She looks back at her co-worker. "Is he a regular?"

"Yeah," Monty replies, "a regular asshole."

There's the sound of a cup being placed down behind her, and Clarke spins around to see the customer finishing the knot on his apron. He gives her a mocking salute, then takes a sip of his coffee. "But you can call me Bellamy."

It takes Clarke a moment to register the implications of what he's saying. She swallows tightly, then whips back around to glare at Monty. He apparently knows what she's going to say even before she says it, because he takes a self-preservational step backwards. Lowly, Clarke says, "I hope that was funny."

"I couldn't resist." He shrugs helplessly, not an ounce of apology in his eyes. In anticipation of further angered words directed at him, his hands go to the apron at his waist. "Anyway, have fun. It was nice meeting you."

He turns to go, but before he steps out from behind the bar, he looks past Clarke at Bellamy, who is still peacefully sipping at his coffee. "A warning about the Synesso - "

"Lizzie's temperamental today," he interrupts. He's close enough behind Clarke that she can feel the rumble of his voice through her back. "I heard you talking to the newbie about it. Which part?"

"Far left grouphead is running hot."

Bellamy moves around Clarke to turn on the part in question, which, instead of releasing a stream of water, emits a burst of steam. He quickly shuts it off and nods, then in quick business-like fashion, heads over to the cash and starts serving one of the waiting customers without missing a beat. Clarke can see that he's handling the situation perfectly well and takes the opportunity to catch Monty before he disappears into the office.

She glances back at Bellamy before asking under her breath, "Is he really an asshole all the time?"

"It's Bellamy," Monty answers, as though that should be good enough. When he sees that Clarke is clearly going for a more detailed response, he rephrases: "He's as much of an asshole as he needs to be. What really matters is that he's the best barista in this place, and his tips are through the roof. So I'm not complaining."

Clarke is about to demand further explanation, but she's interrupted by the call of "Newbie!" from the bar. Resisting the urge to flip Bellamy off, she returns to the bar to see him standing by the cash with a clipboard in hand. She hesitates, but he beckons her forward with a look that clearly says, "I don't have time for your distrust."

Clarke comes closer, casting her eyes over the door to see if there are any more customers to save her from whatever Bellamy wants to talk to her about. Unfortunately, there aren't any. After having worked an afternoon shift on her second day, Clarke knows from experience that the coffee-buying traffic slows to a crawl just after three. And it's three-thirty on the dot.

With no respite in sight, Clarke finally turns her attention to her colleague, who has started tapping his pen on the board - both as a sign of impatience and, she thinks, to annoy her into giving in. It works. She snatches the pen from his hand and snaps, "Is there something you'd like to say to me?"

"Well, now that you've taken my pen, I'd like to ask you to give it back." He holds out his hand expectantly, and after a second, Clarke places the ballpoint on his palm. He twirls it around, then says, "Now for what I actually wanted to say: I need your full name."

"For what?"

Bellamy looks up from his clipboard, evidently put off by the question. "You had your drinks training yesterday."

"Yeah, and?"

The confusion shifts into bemusement as he sets his clipboard down on the counter. "You were told that you were going to be supervised by another barista to finish off your training, right?"

Clarke starts into another eloquent, "Yeah, and?" before she realizes what he's saying and a groan escapes her mouth instead. His responding smirk only makes it worse. She lets out a short breath and says, "You're going to be supervising me."

"With observation skills like those, I'm surprised you're a barista and not a detective," Bellamy says in way of answer. He picks up the clipboard again and repeats, "Full name?"

Clarke sighs, but obliges. "Clarke Griffin."

Bellamy writes it out, and over the edge of the clipboard, Clarke can see his scrawl rivals a doctor note's for illegibility. There's a long list of boxes to check off, separated into five sections. When he sees Clarke looking, Bellamy turns it around so that she can read it. "I need to review all this with you over the next five days."

"Then we've got a lot of work to do," Clarke mutters, briefly scanning some of the points:  _Knows how to make lattes in four sizes_ ;  _Can make a servable trad cap_ ;  _Observes proper Synesso care_.

"You're right about that," Bellamy says, "which is why I've broken it down into sections."

"Lattes and Cappucinos, Grinder Calibration, Synesso Maintenance and - "

Bellamy frowns, then flips the board around to see where she's getting the titles. He shakes his head derisively. "No, these are just skill sets. They're boring as hell to do alone, though, which is why I've made my own sections. From personal experience."

Clarke raises an eyebrow at him, wondering if she should request another supervisor. Then again, Kane, her boss, probably wouldn't appreciate her inability to work with her co-workers, and if she had to guess who would be fired first, the answer probably wouldn't be Bellamy. Instead, she asks, "Then why are we using the checklist?"

Bellamy runs his pen down the list. "Like I said, these are skill sets. But there are some things that are equally important that are also, coincidentally, not taught at drinks training because they aren't specifically about the drinks. They're about the people who order them, and how to serve them."

"Then why are you evaluating me on that stuff?" The moment the words leave Clarke's mouth, she realizes how stupid the question was. It's her bad luck that Bellamy doesn't let it slide, either.

He seems to enjoy the question very much. "Why would I evaluate you on one of the most important aspects of your job? I don't know. It's a mystery."

"That's not what I meant - "

"And that's why I'm going to let it go. But the fact that you asked it at all is probably why I was assigned to you." Bellamy jerks his head in the direction of the Synesso machine. "So we're going to get started on our first section."

Clarke eyes him, thinking he looks a little too gleeful than is probably right. Warily, she asks, "What's the first section?"

" 'The customer is always right.' "

Clarke closes her eyes and tries not to swear out loud. That's why he finds this so funny; the memory of taking his order is still fresh in Clarke's mind, along with her response. Suddenly, his annoying behavior while masquerading as a customer makes sense, and Clarke feels the overwhelming desire to smack herself in the face. She is more certain than ever before that today's training is not going to go well.

When she opens her eyes again, Bellamy is waiting with a broad grin. "Shall we?"

As he moves over to the espresso machine, she says, "You did that on purpose, earlier."

"Of course I did." He doesn't need to look at her for her to feel the power of his extreme self-satisfaction. "And you responded better than I could have hoped. You were so completely awful that I just knew I would have a great time teaching you how wrong you were."

Anger flares up in the pit of Clarke stomach. In a tone that borders on scathing, she asks, "And how's that working for you?"

The grin returns. "So far, it's working out great."

She doesn't bother to hide the sigh that escapes her lips as she moves to join him. The sad fact of the matter is that it really has all worked out in his favor, which doesn't make Clarke feel any more kindly towards him. Though, even if the "rude customer" act hadn't been a part of his so-called "lesson", the self-righteous smirk and boastful attitude would have had the same effect. She isn't sure how Monty can look past his evident character flaws; at the moment, she feels as though there is nothing Bellamy can do - short of saving the world from a hurtling comet - that will make her do the same.

Her ultimatums always sounded fairly dire in her head.

The sound of Bellamy clicking his pen brings her attention back to him. He taps the clipboard once and then the machine to his left. "Right. Make me a medium latte, for here. I'm going to handle the customer who just came in."

He steps around her, leaving Clarke to work the bar. She immediately gets to work pulling a shot and steaming milk; her instructor the day before told her she had perfect technique, and she's prepared to inform Bellamy of the fact if he says otherwise. Just as she finishes pouring the latte, Bellamy appears at her side. She sets the milk pitcher down and gives him a confident look. "Medium latte for here."

Bellamy blinks. Clarke is about to take it as a good sign - he'd hoped she would slip up, white-out the latte, pull the shot short, anything to ruin the drink - but then he frowns. "I didn't order a medium latte, I ordered a large. And I need to be at the office in fifteen minutes. How the hell am I supposed to take it  _for here_?"

The sense of assurance drains from Clarke's chest, replaced by a surge of annoyance. "No, I distinctly remember you saying 'medium latte for here'."

Bellamy raises his eyebrows at her. "Is that how you would respond to a customer?"

"No, of course not, but you're not a customer, and I know what you said, and it definitely wasn't a large latte to go," Clarke replies sharply.

Bellamy takes a step closer, but Clarke refuses to take a step back to compensate. "Do you think that matters?"

"It should."

The look he gives her is so condescending that Clarke's teeth are immediately set on edge. "People leave their Visa cards in the machine and forget their car keys by the cash every single day, but you think that they're going to be able to correctly order a latte ten times out of ten? Come on, Griffin. When a customer says they didn't order what you think they ordered, what do you do?"

Sarcastically, Clarke says, "I'm assuming I'm not supposed to tell them they're wrong?"

"You're hilarious."

Clarke purses her lips, then answers, "I go check the receipt to see what they were charged for, and either I'm wrong, or they are."

Bellamy reaches past her to snag the latte. The motion brings him even closer, but Clarke is too surprised by his lack of respect for personal space to do anything but glower at him as he takes an appreciative sip of her drink. This near to her, she can see that he has even more freckles than she had previously thought - probably not the most original observation of his appearance, and probably not the wisest, because when he looks up from his coffee, it's hard to hide the fact that she was staring at him the whole time. She glances away and clears her throat as he prompts, "And?"

It takes a second for Clarke to gather her wits about her. "If I'm wrong, I remake the drink. If they're wrong, then I void the order and pay them back the balance before they resubmit the new order for me to remake."

Bellamy takes another sip, making a satisfied sound low in his throat. "Need I point out to you what the result of any complaint is?"

Clarke takes in a deep breath to control the urge to tip the latte down his front. "I remake the drink for the customer."

He nods. "Keep that in mind, Griffin."

With that, he takes the latte and heads back to the counter, where a newly-arrived customer is fiddling with some of the wrapped brownies on display. Bellamy punches in his order, then calls it out to Clarke, who is annoyed to find that it's a medium latte for here - precisely what she just made, and precisely what Bellamy just drank. She swallows her frustration and makes the drink for the customer, who, unlike Bellamy, doesn't find anything wrong with it and takes it to his seat.

Once the customer is out of earshot, Clarke turns to Bellamy and says, " _That_  is what a customer acts like. They're not rude and awful like you."

Bellamy considers her for a moment, then shrugs. "For the purposes of today's bar review they are."

"But  _why_?" The protest escapes Clarke's lips in full childish glory. The longer Bellamy keeps up this "review", the surer Clarke is that he's only doing it to ruin her day.

That inkling becomes reality when Bellamy grins. "Because if you learn how to handle the worst, then you'll definitely be able to handle the best."

He picks up the latte that Clarke had first made and finishes it in a single gulp, then sets it in the sink to be rinsed before going in the dishwasher. "Besides," he says, "you're wrong about the customers."

Clarke rolls her eyes and starts resetting the espresso machine. "No I'm not."

"Yes, you are." Bellamy is suddenly very close behind her. Just for a moment, Clarke is certain he's trying to make her uncomfortable - it seems like a very Bellamy thing to do – but instead he grabs one of the portafilters that she hasn't emptied and starts to clean it. "All the exercises we're going to do today have happened to me."

Clarke glances at him sidelong, expecting to see him grinning, or watching her, or any other sign to prove that he's joking, but he's focused on his work, evidently uninterested in whatever her response might be. Still, she feels it's her duty to give one. "You've actually had someone say that stupid 'I have to be at the office in fifteen minutes' line to you?"

"I was actually being generous. They said ten." The corner of Bellamy's mouth quirked up. He still didn't look up from his work, but Clarke felt he wasn't really paying attention to it anyways - it had become muscle memory from years of practice. "It was my first day on bar. I barely knew how to make a latte at all, and certainly not a large one, so I made a bad decision and said some poorly-chosen words. Kane pulled me off the Synesso and didn't let me touch it for a week."

"What did you say?"

The edge of his mouth quirks up at the memory. "I said that he might benefit from learning how to read a clock before ordering specialty drinks in the future."

Clarke's eyebrows shoot up, and her wide-eyed look of surprise is what greet Bellamy when he glances over at her to gauge her reaction. He lets out a breath of laughter, then slots the filter back into place and shrugs. "We live and we learn, Griffin. That's all there is to it."

The softness in his voice almost makes Clarke reconsider her judgement of him, but the hesitation ends when he smacks the clipboard against the counter and clicks his pen ten times in a row. He grins wickedly at her, the oddly-serious atmosphere evaporating along with Clarke's budding hopes for a bearable drinks review. Imitating a woman carrying a handbag, Bellamy lounges against the counter and drawls, "Three and a quarter shot large vanilla latte with half soy and almond milk to go."

Clarke grits her teeth, but puts on her best apologetic smile. "Ma'am, we can't pull three and a quarter shots. I can offer you three, or four."

Bellamy smacks his clipboard again, sneering at her. " _Starbucks_ would give me three and a quarter."

Clarke bites back the obvious answer of, "No it wouldn't," and instead says, "Then I guess I'll give you three and a quarter shots."

She moves to start pulling the espresso, but Bellamy's hand is on her arm in a second. She instinctively shakes off his firm grip and demands, "What, now I'm not supposed to please the customer? The customer is always right, right?"

"Not when they're wrong," Bellamy answers, as though this should be completely obvious. "The customer is right within the bounds of the menu. You can't pull three and a quarter shots."

"I could try."

" _Don't_." Bellamy motions with his pen at the menu boards above their head. "There is room for modification. There is no room for fractional shots. Got it?"

"I hate you." He clicks his pen several times as he waits for the correct answer. Finally, Clarke caves and growls, "Got it."

"Good. Then let's move on."

 

They keep at it on and off for the next four hours. The fact that they take breaks is probably the only reason why Clarke is still alive come six o'clock, because otherwise she would've driven one of the food tongs through her brain just to put an end to the nonsense.

Bellamy had been aiming for perfect customer service - which Clarke has now learned more about that she ever thought she'd need over the course of her entire life - but Clarke has in fact learned three other, equally important things. One: Bellamy was born for the theater. Not because he's particularly good at acting, but because he clearly has melodrama in his blood. He slammed his clipboard so many times that Clarke began to wonder if maybe she'd been using it wrong her entire life, because it seemed much better employed as a hammer.

Two: he has an unreasonably good falsetto. If Clarke inhaled helium, she couldn't have gotten her voice higher than his when imitating a particularly feeble old woman who sent back her drink three separate times only to order the same thing over again.

And three: Monty was right about him. He's the best barista Clarke's ever seen - which seems like an odd thing to quantify, but he is. Whenever they took customers, he was charming, funny, helpful, and beyond that, it all seemed so  _genuine_  . . . in short, if she hadn't been standing behind the bar with him, she would have been completely smitten.

As it is, she's thoroughly confused as she signs out for the day. She bumps into Raven in the office, since she'll be taking the rest of the closing shift with Bellamy. When Raven hears about how Clarke's working with him, she scoffs and says, "Good luck," before ducking out the door. Her reaction doesn't help Clarke's conflict. She leaves by the back door instead of going past him.

Unfortunately, she knows she'll be seeing him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> based somewhat (very loosely) on my own experiences in my coffee shop. minus the hot guy. and minus the five day review (because that is ridiculous and this is a fanfic).


	2. cleanliness is next to godliness

"You avoided me yesterday."

Clarke slides her phone under the counter and resolutely does up her apron without looking at him. The clock on the cash reads five o’clock, meaning it’s verging on the evening, but Clarke still says, "Good afternoon to you too, Bellamy."

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see him toss the cloth he was using to wipe down the counter into the sink and step closer to her. He leans on the counter to get her attention, but she resists his attempts and checks the register instead. He presses on. "You didn't come out the front because you were avoiding me."

"The walk to the bus stop is shorter from the back," Clarke replies, only half-lying. The walk is arguably the same from either side of the building, but there's no way she'll ever admit that out loud.

"Avoiding me," Bellamy singsongs as he snatches a pen from the container beside the register.

"You are twelve years old."

"A twelve-year-old that's in charge of you for the next four hours." He reaches under the cash and grabs his clipboard, but sets it aside almost immediately as the bell above the door alerts them to the presence of a new customer. Bellamy takes his place behind the Synesso machine as Clarke sets up the cash.

A dark-haired girl a year or two younger than Clarke wearing a dress patterned in blue daisies marches up to the counter. Large sunglasses ride low on her nose, and she looks Clarke up and down over their rims. Then she turns her eyes to Bellamy and, without warning, calls out, "Hey, fuckface, where's my boyfriend?"

Clarke's eyes widen, but before she can respond—if she even  _can_ respond to that—Bellamy slides a caramel latte across the counter to her and grins. "Does Mom know you use that kind of language in public?"

"Mom doesn't even know I have a boyfriend," the girl answers, taking the latte and tossing a crumpled fiver across the counter to him. Clarke looks between the two of them, then slowly slides the bill from in front of Bellamy and makes the girl's change. The girl, after an expectant pause, blinks at Bellamy and says, "Well? Have you seen him or not?"

Bellamy rolls his eyes and addresses Clarke. “Griffin, was Lincoln still in the back when you clocked in?"

"Yeah."

He turns back to the girl—his sister, as Clarke has finally processed—and gestures exaggeratedly at the hallway to the back office. "Your prince awaits."

"You're a dork and I hate you." The girl takes a sip of her latte and closes her eyes in a moment of bliss. She rephrases, "Okay, I don't hate you completely."

Bellamy waves her off, and she has no sooner disappeared into the back office than Bellamy is back at his list. He starts circling things as Clarke takes the three other waiting customers who've entered sometime in the last two minutes. Every once in a while, she hears Bellamy laugh to himself before gleefully clicking his pen a few times and underlining a bullet point for emphasis. It's because of this that she takes particular pleasure in delegating the bar drinks to him, during which she takes his pen and tosses it under the counter. She decided before she came in that afternoon that she wasn't going to back down from any challenge he had to offer, but it didn't mean she couldn't mess with him just for the fun of it.

And his confused scrabbling for a pen when he returns to his clipboard is definitely fun.

As she sends the last customer on her way with a scone and a cup of mint tea, she finally faces Bellamy, who has dug out a Sharpie from one of the miscellaneous drawers and has gone on circling with somewhat less enthusiasm without his pen.

He notices her watching him and brandishes his new writing utensil with an accusatory flare. "You stole my pen, didn't you?"

Clarke scoffs. "Yeah, everyone's out to get you, Bellamy. I also poisoned your coffee, and there's a bomb planted under your car in case that doesn't work out."

He eyes her warily, then drops it and sets the clipboard down on the counter in front of her. "We're going to be covering a lot of closing stuff today, since you know how to work with the Synesso now. Kane also said you only had one closing shift instead of two, so it's going to count as a closing practice shift as well. Technically, that means we should have another person helping out, seeing as you'll be my trainee, but Raven had a date and Wick said he was all booked up, so our two regular closers are gone. But I think we'll manage fine on our own, don't you?"

Clarke's deadpan expression is answer enough.

Bellamy drops his business-like act and flips his Sharpie into the air with a grin. "Then let's get to it!"

He jerks his head in the direction of the espresso machine. Clarke moves over and leans against the back counter as Bellamy looks back at his list. After a second lost in his own thoughts, he looks up at her and crosses his arms over his chest. "Today's theme is 'Cleanliness is next to godliness.' It's a lot harder to screw this one up, Griffin, so I think you'll be pleased."

She resists the urge to flip him off and instead says, "Do you really want to patronize me when I could easily tell Kane you let a non-employee into the back office without his permission?"

He mocks her by making a talking gesture with his hand, but he changes the subject anyways. Jovially, he questions, "Did you have a shower this morning?"

Clarke's face contorts into an expression halfway between confusion and offense. "What?"

"Answer the question."

"No, fuck you," Clarke shoots back impulsively. A panicked voice in the back of her head has begun to worry if she smells, or if there's something on her face, or a hair out of place in her bun, but she shuts it down. She had a shower three hours ago;  _she's fine._

Bellamy rolls his eyes skyward before heaving a sigh and pointing at himself. "Well,  _I_ had a shower this morning. Do you know why I did that?"

Clarke stares at him mutely.

When he realizes she's not planning on answering, he says, "I had a shower because I want to look and smell nice. Because I'm going to be doing my job and I want to represent my company well, even if it's just an independent coffee shop next to a used book store and an antiques shop that probably doesn't give people very high expectations. Because if people come in here and see a dirty, gross employee, they're going to think anything they buy here is equally dirty and gross."

He taps the Synesso machine with his Sharpie and asks, "How does this relate to Synesso care?"

Clarke blinks at him, then decides to answer him properly. "If the Synesso is dirty and gross, it's like a dirty, gross employee."

"Your analysis is skilled and astute, young grasshopper," Bellamy replies. He ignores Clarke's "Did you just?" look and pulls open a drawer under the machine. Inside are a few bottles, a toothbrush, and a small container labelled  _Screws_. "This is the Synesso care drawer. We won't be using any of this stuff yet, since we're not closing for another four hours. We'll start shutting down groupheads at close."

Clarke nods along, but she knows this stuff. It was already covered on her first closing shift; the reason she lets him go on is really only because she likes listening to him talk— _What? What did she just think?_ —correction, she likes the review, and she lets him continue  _out of courtesy_.

Bellamy is about to start into the next section of his clipboard when a customer appears at the front counter. He sets his list aside and calls out a mocha, which sets Clarke into action. She briefly glances at the customer as she slides the finished drink over to him, then turns around to set aside the milk pitcher and nearly runs directly into Bellamy, who has come up behind her. He's watching the customer over the Synesso, as though the machine will hide him in case the customer ever looks over his shoulder.

"I went to high school with that guy," he says, jerking his head in the customer's direction. "He once got high at lunch and rammed his head through the atrium windows."

Clarke eyes Bellamy with something like concern. "What does this have to do with anything?"

"I was just thinking that his glass eye isn't really doing anything for him, that's all," he replies, a wicked grin coming to his face. "He used to hit on my sister when she came by after middle school, and I had to knock him to the pavement to get him to lay off."

"Again, relevance?"

Bellamy looks at her, the smile becoming a demand for the slightest bit of cooperation. "Come on, it's a weird story. That's the relevance. You've got some weird stories too, right? You look like you do."

"I look like I have weird stories." Clarke blinks, then deadpans, "It's the bun, isn't it? Or is it the Lululemon bag I have in the back?"

Bellamy scoffs and shakes his head. "Say whatever you want, Griffin, but you've got at least one, and you're going to tell it to me by the end of the night."

Clarke rolls her eyes. Without gracing his wager with an answer, she heads over to the pile of dirty dishes sitting in the sink and starts loading up the dishwasher in the hopes that Bellamy will let this particular interest of his go. It seems to work momentarily as Bellamy busies himself with other things around the coffee shop, but within ten minutes—which is the time it takes Clarke to get to the bottom of the pile, which she blames Lincoln for not clearing away during his shift—he's back at her side, tapping his Sharpie against his clipboard as a replacement to the clicking of his pen. He hops onto the counter above the dishwasher and nudges her.

"You're not supposed to be sitting there," Clarke says before he can get a word in. "The counter could break under your huge ego."

As she sets the dishwasher to the proper cycle, she hears rather than sees Bellamy laugh. "You are such a cliché, Griffin."

Clarke slams the door on the dishwasher and mimes putting a phone to her ear. "Hello, kettle? It's Bellamy. You're black."

Bellamy slides off the counter, but points the Sharpie at Clarke and says, "That line's from  _Friends_. You're just proving my point here."

"Better than having to make up a weird story just for the sake of your own dumb curiosity," Clarke retorts, drying her hands and snatching the marker from Bellamy's fingers. "And I  _did_  steal your pen, and I'll steal this Sharpie too if you don't stop using it to make noise or accuse me or anything else you plan on using it for in the near future."

He grabs it back, then juts out his chin and smacks the marker against the board so hard it slips out of his hand and clatters to the floor. His eyes go to it, then back to Clarke. "You wouldn't mind pretending that never happened, would you?"

"I will remind you of it every day until you die."

"Thanks for your support." He stoops and retrieves the Sharpie, then jerks his thumb at the cash. “Get the next customer while I head to the back office to see what’s taking my sister so long.”

As he walks past her, Clarke smirks and says, “I think you know what they’re doing.”

“I know I do, and I also know that if I let them go at it for much longer I’ll probably have to sterilize the entire back office. Again.” He’s gone before Clarke can work up the courage to ask what, exactly, was meant by the “again” at the end of his sentence.

She deals with the customer, who is actually looking for the nearest Starbucks and seems very reluctant to correct her order from a “grande” to a “medium” vanilla latte, which Clarke makes after the significant fuss the customer makes. It gives her an immense sense of satisfaction to see the woman’s confusion when the drink comes without whipped cream, and sends her on her way before turning to the shift checklist and working her way down the list.

Sometime during this process, Bellamy returns, wordlessly grabs a bottle of sanitizing spray, and slips away again. Lincoln and Octavia appear in the front after the slam of the back door, cheeks flaming but beaming like idiots. As Octavia leaves, she calls out to Clarke, “Hey, Griffin, tell my brother we’re sorry. And also, cool name.”

Clarke signs her the OK, and Bellamy’s sister loops her arm through Lincoln’s and strides off without an inch of remorse. Clarke doesn’t even feel the need to correct her on her name; at least when Octavia says it, she thinks it’s her first and doesn’t use it like Bellamy does – in a way that somehow irritates her to no end and yet sends hot streaks through her chest.

By the time Bellamy finishes in the back room, the clock has ticked down to six and Clarke has refilled all the sugar containers and espresso hoppers, scrubbed down the inside of the dishwasher, and served exactly five people. Two of them, a man identified as John Murphy from his rewards card and a girl whose card was simply marked “Emori,” if that’s even a name, took their coffees for here and are currently staring at each other from across the room in a way that makes Clarke want to shout “get a room” but can’t because she would probably get reported.

Bellamy slams the cleaning spray into its cupboard and vigorously scrubs his hands in the sink before he finally lets out a heavy breath and leans against the back counter beside Clarke. He crosses his arms over his chest and casts his eyes skyward. “Do you have any siblings, Clarke?”

“No.”

“You’re lucky.”

Clarke hesitates a moment before asking, “Did they really do it back there?”

Bellamy glances at her sidelong and shakes his head. “They got close enough, though.”

She grins. “So you’re a closet germaphobe, then?”

His eyebrows rise before he understands her meaning and he shakes his head again, more emphatically. “Not even a little bit. But every time anything like that happens back there, and someone figures it out, they always think it was me.”

“Why?”

“You bring a girl back there _one time_ —”

Clarke elbows him in the side, and he cuts off with an out-of-breath laugh. “Why would you ever want to bring a girl back there? The bathrooms are sexier than that rabbit hole.”

“The girl I was with at the time happened to find rabbit holes particularly erotic,” Bellamy says, not even making an effort to come up with a believable lie. Ignoring Clarke’s exasperated look, he peers out across the coffee shop and sees something that makes him smile. “Murphy’s back.”

Clarke follows his gaze to the dark-haired individual, drinking a similarly-dark brewed coffee and still eyeing the girl by the windows. “Yeah. Is he a regular?”

“He’s in and out, but he always manages to catch the eye of the prettiest girl nearby and seduce them from the opposite side of the shop.” Bellamy glances at Emori and gives her a quick once-over, then shrugs. “To be honest, I’m not sure why he’s not staring at you.”

Clarke’s eyes instantly go to Bellamy’s face, which shifts infinitesimally as he realizes he just gave her a compliment. He clears his throat and looks down at her, then stutters out, “What I meant was that you’re more— The girl he’s looking at is just— He’s got a thing for— Forget it.”

“Not going to happen. And speaking of things I’m also not going to forget, remember that time when you dropped your Sharpie and I said I would never let you live it down?”

Bellamy makes an annoyed noise low in his throat and pushes off the counter to man the cash for the customer who has just come in. Behind his back, hidden from the customer’s eyes, he flips Clarke off with both hands. She tosses her hair over her shoulder with a triumphant smile.

Either Bellamy isn’t being as much of an asshole today or Clarke has begun to acclimatize to perpetual state of annoyance, but the next two hours pass with far more ease than even five minutes had gone by the day before. Maybe it’s because they get a rush of people coming in for coffee dates, which keeps them occupied for a good while, or because Bellamy hasn’t picked up his clipboard once since he came back from cleaning up the back, but somehow they succeed, at least this time around, in working as a team. The floor behind the counter gets swept with minimal broom-whacking of toes (Bellamy to Clarke), two of the five brewers get shut down for the night with only a minor burn from the boiling water (Clarke on Bellamy’s hand as payback for the broom), and they make enough tea bases to last for the next four days with a minimum of spillage (both of them).

Over the course of the two hours, amidst the actual work getting done, Bellamy pops up to interrupt Clarke with weird stories in attempt to get her to spill something of her own. While she was loading up the dishwasher for the umpteenth time, he slid up beside her and said, “Funny story about that dishwasher. I once got my pinky stuck in it for three hours.”

When Clarke gave him a caustic look, he showed her his left pinky for effect. The first knuckle was slightly askew. “I slammed it shut so hard that it got lodged in place and Marcus had to call some dishwasher repair guys to come in and take the whole door off. The cycle had stopped halfway through, so all the water drained out onto the floor and we had to close early. Pretty weird, huh?”

Upon her answer, “ _I don’t have any weird stories_ ,” he huffed and moved on, only to be back ten minutes later while she was pausing to take a sip of water.

“Speaking of water, one time my sister was swimming in a lake upstate and she could have sworn something grabbed her ankle but she swam out before she could check to see if it was seaweed so we never went back to the lake just in case—”

“In case the Loch Ness monster immigrated to upstate New York?”

Bellamy pouted. “You ruin the fun in everything.”

And finally, when Clarke was restocking the to-go counter with Splenda packets, Bellamy ducked out from behind the counter and said, “This one time, a woman came in and ordered a latte, then came over the service counter and started having a fit because the honey hadn’t been put out because she claimed to be allergic to any crystalline substances due to their adverse nature on her aura. When we told her we were out of honey, she threw her coffee on the floor and accused us of trying to murder her, then came back the next day and did the same thing over again.”

It was after this encounter that Clarke grabbed Bellamy by the shoulder and said, “Do you want me to make up a story? I can do that. I can make up something about balloon animals or my Aunt Ruth’s gastrointestinal cyst or anything you want.”

Bellamy made a face. “Nothing about cysts, please.”

“What, you get a guy with a glass eye and I can’t talk about my aunt’s cyst?” Clarke set the Splenda aside and went on, “I can’t talk about a cyst that took over her entire body until she just became one big cyst? A huge cyst with pearl earrings? She grew fifty feet and rampaged through Santa Fe. It was on the news: ‘Ginormous Cyst Lady Conquers New Mexico.’ That’s better than all of your stories put together, I’d say. _Pretty weird, huh?_ ”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Lies don’t count.”

Clarke shrugged and wordlessly returned behind the counter to check out the next item on the shift to-do list, leaving Bellamy eyeing her moodily from the front.

In fact, Clarke has plenty of odd stories, as anyone does. But she has decided that watching Bellamy putter around, muttering under his breath about freak accidents or odd coincidences, is far more amusing that simply giving in and telling him any of them.

At eight-thirty, Bellamy gestures at Clarke to tell the customers they’ll be closing in half an hour. She makes the rounds, noting that while Murphy has gone, Emori is sitting in the same spot, reading a book and fingering a slip of paper with a phone number penned onto it that she hadn’t had before.

By the time it reaches nine, all the customers have cleared out, so Bellamy locks the doors and whips the keychain across the room to land on one of the couches. He claps his hands loudly and grins wickedly. “Avoid my tales of woe all you want, Griffin, but it’s time to come clean . . . the espresso machine.”

“Was that supposed to be a fucking pun?”

“What’s this ‘supposed to be’ nonsense?” Bellamy replies, then hops up and over the counter to retrieve his clipboard from the back counter. “Have you ever closed down the Synesso before?”

“No. I also have never made a terrible pun before.”

“Then you haven’t lived. On both cases.” Bellamy sets his clipboard down again, but makes a prominent display of tucking the Sharpie into the waistband of his jeans with the clear intent to show that he’s not going to lose another writing utensil today. He grabs a screwdriver and pulls out the portafilter from the nearest grouphead. “Get over here.”

Clarke obeys, ducking her head to see what he’s gesturing too. Bellamy hands her the screwdriver and says, “See the screw there?”

“Yeah.”

“Unscrew it.”

Clarke scowls at him, but follows the command, catching the screw when it falls and the small metal grille that comes out with it. Bellamy points at a small plastic tub under the counter, which she dumps them in, before saying, “Now do the other two.”

Doing as he says, Clarke makes sure to take her time about it. “I was wondering where Asshole Bellamy went.”

“Fine. _Please_ do the other two, your Highness, darling, light of my life.” Bellamy looks down at her at the same time as she looks up and their eyes lock in an odd mutual mix of amusement and annoyance. Clarke purses her lips, then finishes what she started and tosses the parts into the tub.

“Now that you’re done, just spray the espresso wash up into them and let them sit for a good five minutes, give them a scrub, and you’re good. Put the portafilters in the tub while you’re at it, so we can soak them for a while.” Bellamy returns to his checklist, crossing out a few things, then nodding. “I’ll finish shutting down the other brewers. If you need any help, just ask.”

Just as he’s about to move off, Clarke frowns. “Wait, that’s it?”

He pauses expectantly. “That’s what?”

Clarke blinks. “Where’s the looming over me until I get it right? Or the angry tapping or clicking or whatever you plan on doing with that Sharpie? I was all psyched up for an intense hour of hating you and you’re just going to let me be?”

Bellamy peered at her, unsure how to answer for a moment. When he does, it’s clear he hasn’t understood her. “Do you want me to loom, or . . .”

Clarke sighs exasperatedly. What she really wants—for a reason that isn’t quite clear even to her—is to figure him out. And maybe, after the ridiculous, admittedly _fun_ shift she just had, she’s waiting for him to prove her wrong. Because if he doesn’t, then that means that maybe she was wrong yesterday and she judged him a bit too quickly. And Clarke doesn’t like admitting that she was wrong, even to herself.

“Just shut down the brewers, Bellamy. I’ve got it,” she replies in defeat. He gives her a confused look, but doesn’t question her. They set themselves to their separate tasks in an uncomfortable silence that lasts for what feels like a million years.

Then, something in Clarke admits another defeat, of a different nature. She grabs the chrome polish and starts cleaning the machine before clearing her throat. “One time, I was on the bus, and I forgot my phone on my seat. I only realized this once I got off the bus, but I managed to catch up with it before it pulled away. I was really embarrassed, so when I went to ask the man who’d taken my seat if he’d seen my phone, I . . . somehow started speaking in a Scottish accent. And once I started I couldn’t stop, so basically, I had a good thirty second conversation with the guy, sounding like I just stepped off the plane from the Highlands, when he finally found my phone and I got off the bus before I could say anything else in any other accents.” She glances over at Bellamy, who has stopped cleaning the brewers to listen with a growing grin on his face. She feels a heat rising in her cheeks and looks away. Weakly, she concludes, “Pretty weird, huh?”

“How do you just accidentally start speaking in a Scottish accent?” Bellamy asks, a tone of bemused awe in his voice.

Clarke bites her lip. “I was watching a show about a police constable in northern Scotland at the time, so the accent had been on my mind, I guess. That makes the story less weird, though, so I didn’t want to include it.”

“That’s still pretty weird, Griffin.” Bellamy shoves the final brewer aside just as Clarke completes her polishing job on the Synesso. He jerks his thumb at the display cases for her next job, but stops her on the way with a hand on her arm to ask with a grin, “Got any more stories like that?”

“What, one isn’t enough?”

“Hey, I gave you four solid weird stories today,” he says defensively, and Clarke can see what made that girl go fool around in the back office with him. The wry look, the sense of humor halfway between lame and sarcastic, and his undeniable—despite how much she’s tried—good looks are a potent combination, and Clarke thinks that maybe she should back out of this situation before she starts to see anything more.

She slides out of his grip and busies herself with the display case. In the most efficient manner possible, she recites, “I almost ate a frog once. I _actually_ ate a butterball once, because it kind of looked like a moulded custard. And I once got drunk enough at a party that on the way home I re-enacted the titular scene from _Singin’ in the Rain_.”

A silence falls as Bellamy tries to figure out how to reply. After a solid minute, he asks, “How did I piss you off this time?”

“You didn’t,” Clarke says, though internally she curses the timing of the one time he has tried to be perceptive in her presence, because he’s actually half-wrong. She’s not fully angry with him—she’s angry with a lot of things, some of which have to do with him, but a lot of which also have to do with herself. She swipes the crumbs from her hands into the garbage and slides the doors shut on the display case.

Bellamy moves closer, shaking his head. “No, I did. Tell me what it is.”

Clarke’s about to protest, but he cuts her off by gesticulating at the empty coffee house. “We’re alone, Griffin. You can say whatever the hell you want.”

Clarke glares up at him, noticing how the humor has faded from his expression, replaced by a sternness that was likely bred from years of dealing with Octavia, who had come off as the wild-child of the family in as much as Clarke had interacted with her thus far.

Finally, she bites out, “I don’t get you. One day you’re the biggest dick on the face of the Earth and the next day you’re a geeky older brother who has a thousand weird stories to tell—”

Bellamy looks almost offended as he interrupts, “Am I not allowed to be both people?”

“That’s not the point.” An image of a brown-haired girl flashes across the backs of her eyelids—both a reminder and a warning. Clarke rubs her hand over her eyes and unclenches her jaw. “I’ve just been really close with people like that in the past and it hasn’t turned out the best for me, all right?”

“Are we close? Because by my count, we’ve known each other for two days.” If Clarke didn’t recognize the injured look in Bellamy’s eyes, the anger in his voice would have sounded even harsher against her ears. He glances at the clock, then says, “You’ve mopped the floors before, right?”

Since the question comes out of nowhere, Clarke answers without wondering why he’s asking. “Yeah.”

“And you’ve marked the bases and done the inventory?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Then you can go home. Clock out. I’ll finish this by myself.” He turns away before she can get a word in, going back to his job with the brewers.

Clarke stares at the back of his head in mute confusion for a moment, the heat of her rage subsiding. “What?”

“Leave, Clarke,” Bellamy says. It might be the first time he’s ever used her first name.

“But you’re not supposed to be alone in the shop—”

“I’m your supervisor, and I’m giving you a direct order. Are you going to disobey me?” He hasn’t looked at her once.

Clarke’s mouth drops open slightly as he pulls rank on her. After a stunned second of silence, her hands clamp into fists and she spits out, “Fine, I’ll leave.”

Bellamy says nothing.

She whips off her apron and stalks to the back room, where she shoves the apron into her cubbyhole on the wall. She clocks out and grabs her bag, but unlike yesterday, she isn’t going to give Bellamy the satisfaction of leaving by the back. Slinging the strap of her messenger over her shoulder, she strides back out into the coffee shop, retrieves the keys from where they landed when Bellamy tossed them, and goes to the door.

Her fingers fumble with the keys as she struggles with the lock. She doesn’t understand why everything blew up all of a sudden—the memory of Lexa had only been called up after she’d told him the truth, not before, to serve as a reminder about why she couldn’t trust too easily too quickly. Which meant that what had flustered her prior to that had to have been something else, something beyond logic or reasoning. Something she doesn’t even know if she has felt before with anyone else.

That thought annoys her even more, so when she finally gets the door unlocked, she shoves it open with far more force than necessary and chucks the keys over her shoulder without caring where they land. Somehow, even after all the progress she’d thought they’d made this shift, they’re back to square one.

She’ll worry about that tomorrow. For now, she just really wants to hit something.

Maybe she needs a drink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow this is like two weeks late  
> but i hope you guys liked it! i'll talk more about lexa next chapter i think, and hopefully it won't end with either one of them storming out.  
> please let me know what you thought of the update!


	3. speed is secondary

"You pissed him off."

Raven sets her apron down beside Clarke's feet, which are propped up on the single, beat-down desk shoved into the corner of the office. She drags over two milk crates stacked on top of each other and takes a seat, cocking her head at her companion until she looks up. Raven arches her eyebrows at her. "Seriously. What did you say to him?"

"Why are you assuming it's something I said to him? He's a dick. You know that." Clarke tosses her phone onto the desk and exchanges it for Raven's apron. "Maybe you should be asking him what happened."

"Yeah, like that's going to get me anywhere. He's a brick wall." When Clarke moves to stand, Raven puts her hand out to stop her. She gives Clarke a stern look. "He's gonna be an ass today. I mean, he only clicked his pen once when he looked at your review checklist. And he nearly tore the page writing the date."

"I'm sure you're overreacting." Clarke knows she isn't, but she doesn't want Raven to worry. Besides, she can handle Bellamy all on her own. If he's angry with her, then he'd better be ready for a challenge, because Clarke is definitely angry with him.

While remaining unconvinced, Raven seems to get the message and leans back, letting Clarke pass. "Well, best of luck, then."

Clarke has a feeling that she'll be needing it. She ties on the black apron and heads into the front, where Bellamy is cheerfully rattling off the tea options to an older couple. He doesn't look like he's in a bad mood now, but she knows that looks can be deceiving. And she'll be working with those particular looks for the next four hours until close, again. The only good thing about the whole situation is that the shift ends at seven.

All in all, it's not shaping up to be a good time.

Clarke takes a moment to steel her nerves, then puts her head back and walks behind the counter. As she passes Bellamy, there's the barest hitch in his monologue, disrupting his description of their masala chai. She shoves her hands in the sink and nearly bruises her hand forcing the tap on. This is bad sign. She'd managed to forget how annoyed she was last night, but standing within five feet of him is bringing back memories—not of their close, but of the thought that disrupted it. Green eyes, brown hair, and the dull ache of a broken heart almost healed.

She dries her hands just as Bellamy finishes his transaction, and moves to get busy on the dishes—thank God for the ever-present dishes—but the stiff clearing of a throat behind her stops her. She bites her lip, then turns to face him.

The golden afternoon light is streaming in through the front windows, casting bronzed shadows across his face. Literally any other day, Clarke's eyes would have focused on the constellations of freckles, the messy loops of his hair, the hard line of his jaw. Today, however, they lock on his, darkened under heavy brows, and she knows.

He's still pissed.

There's a weighty silence as both waits for the other to speak. After it drags out long enough, Bellamy's jaw unclenches and he grabs his clipboard off the top of the display case. "Get on bar. We've got training to do."

Deliberately antagonistic, Clarke starts, "But the dishes—"

"Leave the fucking dishes." The curse is blunted somewhat by the monotonous way it's delivered. Even still, Clarke stalks past him and directs her attention to the Synesso. Bellamy follows a second later, clicking his pen once and leaning against the back counter. He doesn't look up from the list.

He takes in a breath, then says, "Today's lesson is called 'Speed is Secondary.' But that's a very hard thing to teach, and I've decided to switch things up a little. So right now, the lesson is called 'Speed is Everything,' and you are going to hate it."

Clarke stiffens at the bar but refuses to turn around, refuses to give him the satisfaction. She's going to get a headache if she keeping clenching her teeth like this. Her hands go to the portafilter handles. "I'll try my hardest to."

A dead snort of laughter. "You won't have to."

Clarke's head feels like it's about to explode, but she forces herself to reign it in. She can't snap, not when there are still so many people in the shop. She can't make a scene. But he makes it so hard—her thought cuts off as he steps up behind her. Her pulse rockets into high gear, and she tells herself that it's because she hates it, she hates every bit of it, but it's not entirely true.

When a long arm reaches over her shoulder to grab one of the timers on top of the Synesso and the proximity against her back disappears, she realizes that he did it on purpose. The thought should have occurred to her sooner, but she had been a little preoccupied with trying not to think at all, so the revelation was lagging. He's messing with her, and it makes the anger come rushing back in at full force.

Through gritted teeth, Clarke asks, "What are you doing with that?"

In that same, deadened tone, he says, "You're going to make me a latte in a minute and a half. Starting now."

Clarke spins around, the only question running through her mind being whether he's really petty enough to play it like this, when she sees him standing there holding the timer at eye level. His expression is stony. Her jaw drops. His mouth twists into a malicious smirk. "Eighty seconds."

Rather than give him the satisfaction of seeing her fly off the handle, she immediately turns back to the machine and starts pulling the shots for a medium. While it's going, she pulls the milk from the fridge and starts steaming. Just as the shot finishes—under the time, Clarke has enough time—Bellamy leans over and says, "Oh, yeah, and I want it to be an extra-large."

She looks down at the milk in her hands, now insufficient and, after his interruption, steamed too far. There's a moment where she thinks she can't get wound any tighter, when suddenly, the timer goes off. At her ear, she hears Bellamy's exaggerated sigh.

"You were so close, Griffin." She pivots slowly on her heel to look him in the eyes, sees him smug and utterly reveling in the look on her face. He frowns. "Well, not really."

If Clarke was religious, she would have prayed to a god, any god, to give her strength.

Actually, that's not true. If she was praying for anything, it would be for lightning to shoot down from the sky and strike Bellamy Blake dead in front of her.

She settles for a very vehement, "Fuck you."

Bellamy narrows his eyes at her. "Already? We're only just getting started, Griffin. You don't want to burn through your curse words so quick. You'll be needing some for later."

"Fuck you is surprisingly multi-functional," she says lowly.

As a response, Bellamy starts the timer. He licks his lips. "Extra-large latte. Again."

She returns to the Synesso, moving as fast as she can. She has the four shots ready as she gets the milk steaming when the timer goes.

"Just got away from you, didn't it?" Bellamy is bitterly triumphant. Clarke is about to turn around and give him a piece of her mind, but before she can, he says, "Medium latte. Sixty seconds."

Feeling her blood pressure rise, Clarke discards her failed attempt and starts anew. Shots pull. Milk stretches— _the_ _timer goes_.

Without pause, Bellamy says, "How about a small? A small capp in a minute."

 _Don't give him the satisfaction, don't give him the_ _satisfaction_ —the words are an endless litany as Clarke gets caught in an equally endless loop of half-finished lattes, cappuccinos, fogs, Americanos, café lattes, and macchiatos. Under her breath, there's a steady stream of the filthiest, most curdling swear words in her vocabulary. If Bellamy can hear her, it only heightens his enjoyment. She doesn't see his face for what must be a full half-hour, just hears the false disappointment and impossible orders stream from his lips.

After the timer goes off for the umpteenth time, Clarke slams the milk pitcher down on the counter, sending foam over the rim and onto her hand. She ignores the scalding liquid and looks over at the cash, where a couple is patiently waiting to be served. In a voice barely above a whisper, she says, "Take their order, Bellamy."

"They're not ready yet—"

"Take the goddamn cash and do your goddamn job!" Heads turn sharply, and Clarke sucks in a heavy breath. She doesn't even look at him. She doesn't know if she can without needing to claw his eyes out. Not waiting for his response, she grabs a nearby towel and marches into the back office. The door slams shut behind her. There is silence.

At last.

Clarke scrubs the milk off her hand, glad she hadn't managed to heat it up much before she got cut short. If she was looking at the situation as a level-headed observer, unattached, she would have been able to see that it wasn't all him—she built on him, he built on her, the negative force between them growing until they were both blank with rage. The only difference between them was, he was using his position against her.

He's blaming her for something they're both doing, and Clarke's not going to let him do it anymore.

After her heart rate has calmed, Clarke fixes her hair and walks back out. The couple is gone. A lot of the customers are gone, actually, and it might have something to do with her almost-breakdown, but she doesn't care. She walks up behind the bar, right up to Bellamy. He looks up from his clipboard, about to speak.

"I'm not going to apologize to you. It's not my duty, it's not my divine mission, it's not anything. And if you think that gives you any reason to be an asshole, then you're the one with the problem,  _not me_." He moves to return to his stupid clipboard. Clarke snatches it from his grasp and throws it to the floor. "Are we fucking clear?"

There's a moment where Clarke's not even sure he's hearing her. Then he blinks. The words that come out of his mouth, however, aren't nearly the ones Clarke expected. "I'll grab this customer."

Clarke stands in stunned silence for a second as he steps over the clipboard to the cash. Did he just . . . ignore her? Completely?

"A medium latte to go, if you would," Bellamy calls over from the cash.  _If you would?_  He ignores her and then he pulls that shit? Not on Clarke's watch.  _After this latte, she's going to lay into him like he's never fucking seen._

She pushes that away and makes the latte. The customer asks her what the difference is between a cappuccino and a latte. She answers as she pours his milk, in a cheerful voice that she can hardly believe is coming from her own mouth. Then he and the latte are gone, and Clarke turns around with the full intent to kill Bellamy when she hears the oddest sound.

The timer.

She frowns, not understanding what it means. The timer for the espresso is done. The milk doesn't even  _have_  a timer—

Bellamy holds the timer out to her, still beeping. "Care to do the honors?"

Before she can fully compute his meaning, she reaches out and turns it off. She holds the plastic device in her hands, then looks up at him dumbly. "What?"

"A medium latte in sixty seconds." He takes the timer back and fiddles with it for a moment, then, in a softer voice than she's heard from him all day, he asks, "Could you make me an extra-large latte in a minute and a half?"

Still somewhat in shock, Clarke replies, "Sure."

She gets the shots. She gets the milk. She doesn't even think about the timer, doesn't think about Bellamy standing watch behind her. And she finishes pouring the milk in utter silence. A full five seconds later, the timer beeps.

This time, Bellamy stops it himself. Clarke swallows tightly, then faces him, a look of absolute confusion coming over her. "You gave me more time. You had to have given me more time."

He turns the timer to her and shrugs. "I didn't."

"But I couldn't  _do_  that." Clarke looks at the latte in her hands, and repeats the words quietly to herself.

Bellamy puts the timer on the counter beside him and crosses his arms over his chest. "You couldn't. Because you kept thinking about speed."

"But speed is everything— You said that."

"I said that because you thought that. Everyone does at the beginning, because it's true. Speed is everything. We're serving gourmet coffee, not gourmet meals. It's gotta be quick. That's the business." Bellamy steps forward, all hostility gone. "But once you get that, then we end up back at the first lesson. Speed is secondary, because you already know how to do that."

The words are suspended in the air between them. Then, Clarke sets down her latte, and without any more warning, slaps him.

He reels back, hand instinctively going to his cheek. He stares at her with a look part-confusion and part-annoyance. "What the hell?"

"You were an ass to me all afternoon for that stupid revelation? What, was I supposed to see the light?" Clarke is almost at a loss for words, but she finds more and keeps going. "Was the grand reveal supposed to make me forgive you for that shit? I stood here imagining a thousand different ways to kill you for some cheesy half-assed 'you can do it if you believe in yourself' crap? No, don't answer me—I've heard enough from you this afternoon. Clean the Synesso. It's gross."

She doesn't let him get a word in edgewise before she's off, clearing tables, chatting with customers, leaving him alone with all the work. He put her through hell and enjoyed it. She takes just as much fun in showing him that she can do the exact same thing to him.

Behind the counter, he sighs and picks up a cloth.

 

Clarke slides back behind the counter as the clock nears five-thirty. She spent the last half hour just sitting at a table playing Tetris on her phone, which was certainly a very unproductive use of her own time—she sucks at the game, but she thinks, she  _thinks_ , she's getting better. Her temper has cooled somewhat, or enough to stand being near him again at least. Bellamy is scrubbing down one of the plates in the sink.

Clarke goes to pass him and he steps back, blocking her path. His hands are dripping with soapy water, but he doesn't pay them any mind. Clarke's eyes go to his face, but his own are fixed on a point beneath the floorboards. He chews the inside of his lip for a moment before he draws in a deep breath and says, "I'm sorry."

"Wow, sincerity just oozes out of you, doesn't it?"

His expression clouds over, but he still doesn't look at her directly. "I am, all right? I was angry about yesterday and I shouldn't have been. I hope that you can forgive me."

Clarke stares at him, trying to figure out if he's being serious. When she doesn't say anything, he lets out a sharp sigh and finally draws his eyes over to hers. He shifts his stance a little, evidently not comfortable with this situation. "Look, Griffin, I don't do apologies. Ever. So I'm not good at them. I don't know how I can make you believe me."

All Clarke does is raise her eyebrows and he starts to fidget. It's hilariously clear that he really doesn't do this all that often. He purses his lips and continues, "It was a stupid thing to get annoyed over. And I shouldn't have been . . ."

"An ass?" Clarke supplies.

"I was going to say mean, but sure," he says, smiling tentatively. He clears his throat and ducks his head again, then brings his hand to his hair, apparently having forgotten that it's covered in suds. "So . . . I don't know, I hope you can forgive me. And I . . . already said that, but I mean it, because I . . .  _do_ — Whatever."

"Um, Bell? Your hair?" She can't stop herself from remarking upon it, since it's evident that the realization isn't going to sink in any time soon. At his confused expression, Clarke reaches out and pulls his hand down so that he can see it. His eyes widen imperceptibly as he visibly tries to keep his cool, but Clarke lets out a laugh that shows his efforts are in vain. She grabs some paper towel and says, "Just let me help."

The tension breaks. Clarke doesn't know if she has actually forgiven him, but she didn't expect him to apologize in the first place, so it's a step in the right direction. And as long as she's not directly angry at him anymore, she might as well help him not make a bigger fool of himself than his broken apology already has. She pats the suds out of his hair, keeping her lips pressed together so that no more laughter escapes, since Bellamy's ears are red with embarrassment.

"I personally blame the apology," he says, gesturing at his head. "It threw me off."

"What, being nice for a change?"

"Exactly. It got me all turned around." He punched her lightly on the shoulder, leaving a clump of foam and an expanding wet splotch on her shirt. His expression goes blank. Under his breath, he mutters, "I have got to stop doing this shit."

Clarke uses the paper towel in her hand to wipe it off, then finishes on his hair. She tosses the towel in the garbage. She looks at him for a moment, then says, "I'll think about it."

"You do that. I'll be over here, keeping my hands away from everything." Bellamy gives her a tight-lipped smile, then shoves his hands back into the sink where, presumably, he can no longer use them to get soap on anyone. Clarke rolls her eyes, then notices a customer waiting at the cash and hurriedly dries her hands on her apron.

When she goes to make their latte, she pauses, then picks up the timer Bellamy had used before and starts it. Once she finishes the drink, she hurries to hand off the drink and stop the timer before it goes off, but she can't make it in time. The sharp beep draws Bellamy's head up from the sink. Seeing Clarke holding the device, caught in the act, a wry grin tugs at his mouth.

"You gotta admit, asshole or not, I helped you today, Griffin," he says, evidently very pleased with his own handiwork.

"And you just took two steps back from my forgiveness," Clarke replies, only half-joking. She sets the timer aside and takes a seat on the counter. "But I know how you can win it back."

Bellamy snorts and turns back to his dishes. "Pray tell, your Highness."

"You do the close."

His head whips around so fast he might have gotten whiplash from it. "Wait, what?"

"Do the entire close. By yourself." His eyes saucer, but Clarke remains serenely impassive. When he says nothing, Clarke continues, "You were perfectly happy to do that last night."

Bellamy dries his hands off and protests, "I didn't do the  _entire_  close. You did the groupheads and the display case. And at the time I was acting stupid because I was annoyed that you didn't want to trust me and—"

"You said so yourself, we've only known each other for three days!" Clarke interrupts, the exclamation more surprised than irritated. "Was I supposed be able to trust you?"

"That's not the point."

"Then what is?"

He gestures at the café at large and takes a step closer to her. "I'm not doing the whole close by myself, that's what. I get that I was a dick, but there are certain requirements that have to be met—"

"Like hell there are," Clarke retorts, sliding off the counter and crossing her arms over her chest. "Maximum wait time is three minutes. That's the rule. Not some sixty-second latte crap."

Another step. He rolls his eyes. "Oh, yeah, you're the expert here. Because during a rush hour, you're going to have the time to lounge around the bar when you've got six shots pulling at once and five orders on their way up."

"When it's rush hour, you tandem-bar, and you know that, since  _you're_  the expert here." Clarke points an accusatory finger at him, which is a mistake, because instead of moving away, he takes the opportunity to move closer so that her finger is actually pressed against his sternum.

"Still don't got three minutes." He looms—completely intentionally, Clarke is sure of it—over her, a knowing smile tugging at his mouth. "You know what you got, Princess? Sixty seconds."

Clarke suddenly notices that her pulse is racing in her ears. She's also in the midst of noticing that Bellamy's apron is slipping off his hip on the right side, and that the dark coffee is done to her left, and that Bellamy's lips are maybe ten inches away from hers at this very moment. She swallows, but her throat seems to have closed up. She clears her throat and says, with surprising strength, "Then riddle me this, Mr. Miyagi, why was your lesson called 'Speed is Secondary'?"

He leans closer, bracing his hands against the counter pressing against Clarke's back. Ten inches reduces to five. He grins. The thoughts that had gripped Clarke the day before, the ones that had made her pull away, are replaced by a current of desire strong enough to catch her off-guard. She freezes up as his eyes meet hers. "Because once you know what you're doing, once you find that place where you know just what you're doing, you can make sixty seconds feel like however long you like."

His head dips lower, their noses almost brushing. Clarke tips her head up to catch his words on her skin. His voice lowers to something just above a whisper, and he says, "Mark my words, Princess, once you hit the sweet spot, you don't want to rush it, not for anything in the world."

Clarke isn't sure what's going to happen next, but by some unholy stroke of luck, she'll never know: the timer goes off to her right, making both of them jump and startling them both out of . . . whatever that had been. Clarke clears her throat again, this time in an effort to clear her head, and grabs the timer. She forces a smile. "These shitty timers always start again on me."

"I hear you, Griffin," he replies. His voice, like hers, is a little louder than it needs to be. If Clarke has figured it right, he'd known exactly what he wanted to do next. And she has a feeling that she would have really,  _really_ liked it. But the moment has passed; Clarke's warning signs are back, the phantom with brown hair and delicate features and a knife aimed at Clarke's back.

She sets the timer down and moves to the Synesso. "You give the to-go warning. I'll get started on these groupheads."

Bellamy gives her a cheeky look. "So I'm not doing the close alone? Does that mean I'm forgiven?"

"Do you really want to push your luck?"

He makes a face but wisely refrains from adding anything else. He slides out from behind the counter and makes the run. Clarke watches him as she mindlessly scrubs down the groupheads, wondering if she should have just told him the truth. Yes, she forgives him. She forgave him the moment he shoved his dumb soapy hand into his dumb soapy hair, and she's starting to figure out why. Because for all his bravado and all his bluster, underneath Bellamy Blake is just a big dumb softie. And from what she can tell from the stories her co-workers have told her, he doesn't show it off all that often.

But here he is, holding the door open for the old lady hobbling by with a cane, making a joke that's apparently good enough to reach up and pat him on the cheek for it. And yeah, it would be nice of him to bring it out more often—Clarke's certain that if she ever told Raven her theory about Bellamy, she'd laugh her out of the shop—but at least she's figuring him out. For now, that's good enough.

He locks the door after the woman, then slings the keys across the shop so that they clatter on the tile floors, shocking Clarke from her thoughts. He waggles his eyebrows at her and says, "Time to pump the music."

As he walks past her to the back, she says, "I hope you remember that you're still doing most of the work tonight. I'm just taking pity on your poor guilty soul."

"Thanks, preacher, but the reminder isn't needed," he calls over his shoulder. It's a few seconds before the manager-approved playlist cuts off, and Clarke hears the unmistakable beginning of  _Don't Stop Believin'_. Bellamy's head pops out of the back office with a broad grin plastered across it.

"You can't be serious."

He comes back out to the front and nods. "Oh yeah. It's gonna be all eighties, all night. If I'm doing most of the work, then I am definitely getting to chose the music."

She stares at him, then caves and says, "As long as  _Take On Me_ is somewhere on this playlist, I'm good."

"You think I wouldn't have a-ha's biggest hit on my playlist? What kind of an idiot do you take me for, Griffin?" He gives her a dirty look. "Shame on you."

She rolls her eyes and gets back to work. After a moment, Bellamy does the same. Slowly, the items get checked off the list. It isn't like yesterday, when the talk—whatever talk there was, before they had their argument—was steady. Today, the music fills the empty space, and Clarke thinks that maybe it's for the best. She's a little worried that if they had the opportunity to talk, then there would be a repeat of yesterday's events. The unfortunate consequence of this is that there's no chance to be able to see what would have happened if the timer hadn't interrupted earlier.

For a few minutes, Clarke toys with the idea of telling him about why she'd become so hostile the day before. When she glances over at him, though, she thinks better of it. If Bellamy turns out to be more judgemental than she's assumed, she really doesn't want to learn about that tonight, and she  _certainly_ doesn't want to do it to a soundtrack of Depeche Mode.

So when the shift ends, Clarke clocks out and leaves as fast as possible.  _Tomorrow_ , she thinks.  _Tomorrow she'll tell him all about her._

_Lexa._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> late? yes. maybe if i'm late often enough, then i'll just be on time, huh? (also, i haven't replied to any comments on the last chapter, but i will soon, i promise)  
> anyways...so i hope bellamy wasn't too much of an ass - or if he was, i hope it was understandable (at least from his side).  
> what did you think about their...moment?


	4. our passion is our strength

Octavia is straddling Lincoln when Clarke steps into the back room the next morning.

Wick is leaning against the wall to her left, eyes fixed to the couple in a mixture of confusion and amusement. She glances at him, then quietly asks, "How long have you been standing here?"

"Long enough that I'm late for my clock-in. Watch this." He uncrosses his arms and clears his throat, eliciting no response from the lip-locked couple. After that fails, he wads up his apron, winks at Clarke, then whips it at Octavia's head. The black bundle hits her harmlessly on the neck, but it's enough to get her attention. "Get a room!"

Octavia squares her shoulders and turns around, loudly saying, "Kyle, I swear to God, you're such a hypocrite. Especially after I saw you and Raven—"

At that moment, she sees Clarke standing there too, and she lowers her voice to a regular pitch and finishes, "Doing absolutely nothing out of the ordinary the other day. Hi Griffin. Nice timing." She pats Lincoln on the arm and says hastily, "Let's go to your place."

Lincoln, in as much as Clarke has ever seen him emote, seems perfectly happy with the decision. As they exit the room, Lincoln and Wick silently knock fists. Clarke rolls her eyes and goes to clock in, snatching Wick's apron off the floor and claiming it as her own.

"So, long time no see," Wick says at full volume now that they're alone. "How's our rebel prince treating you?"

Clarke frowns and spins the rolling chair around to look at him. "Is that supposed to be Bellamy?"

"Wait, he hasn't given you his antiestablishmentarian speech yet?" At Clarke's bemused look, he laughs. "Bellamy's a bit of an anarchist. Which makes sense, given that he's in criminology. But if you haven't heard the speech yet, I don't want to spoil it. You'll hear it soon."

"I look forward to it," she replies. She stands and ties the apron around her waist, stepping out of the way to allow him access to the computer. Changing the topic, she says, "I didn't know we had a third person on our shift today."

"It's the morning," he says, knocking his finger on the printed schedule on the wall to his right. "We usually have at least three or four at a time. We've been a little wonky this past week because Kane's on vacation, but the only shifts that are supposed to have two people are the opening and closing ones."

Without needing further prompting, images rise in Clarke's mind from yesterday's close - Bellamy's mouth mere inches from her own, the air between them electric. She thinks to herself that maybe Wick working the shift with them is a good thing. It'll stop whatever almost happened yesterday from almost happening again. She also takes a moment to convince herself that that is what actually she wants.

Wick sees her hesitation and flicks her on the arm. “Go on, Clarke. Bellamy’s out there all alone.”

She glances at him, then tightens the bow on her apron and heads out into the shop. Bellamy doesn’t seem to be having any trouble—the only customer who needs serving is leaning against the counter by the bar, chatting with Bellamy as he whips up her latte with a smile. As Clarke ducks behind the bar, she feels his hand against her arm.

She’s certain the touch is intentional. The knowledge makes the thought of the next four hours simultaneously more bearable and more excruciating—because it’s about time that she stops lying to herself: she wants him. And all the signs point to him wanting her back, but the fact is that she doesn’t really know very much about him, and vice versa.

Relationships based on shaky pasts never end well; Clarke knows from experience.

The customer walks away. Bellamy comes over to the sink, where Clarke is washing her hands. Her chest tightens, wondering what he’ll say, maybe worrying a little too much, but all he asks is, “Who’s on the shift with us?”

Wick’s arrival a moment later preempts Clarke’s response. He claps Bellamy on the shoulder and mutters one of those low, monosyllabic male greetings. When Clarke steps aside, he takes her place at the sink.

As Clarke dries her hands, Bellamy pulls her to the side. With Wick bent over the sink, he risks dipping his mouth a little closer than a colleague really should towards her ear. “What’s wrong?”

Clarke looks at him sharply, surprised at the question. She misjudged how close he was—his earnest dark eyes are inches from hers, and she hardly dares to breathe. Then, she steps back and looks away. Lowly, she says, “I need to talk to you about something.”

“Shoot.” She can feel his eyes searching her face.

“Not with—”

“Whatcha whisperin' about?” Wick tosses his used paper towels in the compost under the back counter and smiles good-naturedly.

Clarke sucks in a deep breath and mirrors his expression. “Training stuff.”

Bellamy doesn’t even miss a beat. Clarke has no idea where he stowed the clipboard that allows him to have it in his hand when she looks over at him a second later. He clicks his pen—he must have brought one in from home, because there weren’t any left in the shop last night, she made absolutely sure—and continues, “Yeah, it’s day four. You know what that means.”

“I have no idea what that means, and I’m a little frightened,” Wick replies.

Bellamy grins. “As my good friend Billie Joe Armstrong says, ‘Our Passion is Our Strength.’”

“So . . . passion?” Clarke looks at Wick, then back at him. “Is there a lot of passion in making coffee?”

The hand holding the pen goes to his chest, feigning injury. “Ugh, I’m hurt, Griffin. Have I taught you nothing?”

"Do you really want me to answer that?"

The affronted gesture deepens as he is apparently at a loss for words.

A customer appears at the cash, and Wick makes a gesture that signals that he’s got it covered, leaving Clarke and Bellamy to move to the Synesso. Bellamy makes a show of scanning his clipboard, but under his breath, he asks, "As long as we keep it down, Wick won't listen in."

Clarke glances over at their co-worker, who is busy taking an order and posing as an unwitting obstacle to Clarke's plans for the shift. Her voice equally low, she replies, "I know I made a big deal about not knowing you, and I wanted to talk about it."

"It?" Bellamy clicks his pen and looks up at her. There's the beginnings of concern in his expression, like he's bracing himself for a dark revelation. Clarke's not sure if her confession will count as one, but she was hoping it didn't. "What's 'it'?"

"The reason I made a fuss."  _This isn't going so great_ , Clarke thinks, even though the conversation has barely begun. It feels like an awkward topic to stumble upon in the first place, and she's bringing it up on purpose. She's an idiot, to say the least. In an attempt to rip off the band-aid, she clears her throat and lets out, "I had a bad experience with an ex."

Bellamy smiles a little. "I already figured that out on my own, Griffin."

Clarke waits a beat, then adds, "A bad experience with my ex-girlfriend."

He blinks, then blows out his cheeks and looks down at his clipboard again. He uses the pen to scratch his eyebrow, but just as his wordless reaction is starting to worry Clarke, he sucks in a breath and says, "I didn't realize you were a lesbian."

"Well, I'm not. So you can stop making that face."

He lifted his head again, mouth dropping open. "I'm not making a face! I was processing. Even computers are allowed a few minutes to load."

"Are you done, then?"

He holds up a finger. "One sec. If you're not a lesbian, then you are . . . ?"

"Bisexual." Clarke is waiting for what she feels to be the inevitable, _Oh, so you just can't decide?_  comment, but none comes. Her heart thuds in her chest as she waits for his reaction. She knows she shouldn't let it bother him if he responds badly, but she thinks she might really . . . like him. Which is a scary thought.

Bellamy clears his throat and nods. "Just wanted to make sure. I mean, Monty's pan, so I didn't want to assume anything."

Clarke raises her eyebrows, a disbelieving smile growing in her lips. "Really?"

"Yeah, I think that's what he said. I mean, sometimes that kid talks so fast it's like it's a race to get his damn sentences out, so I might have misunderstood him. I haven't really asked about it since, because I figure it doesn't really affect me much." He shrugs. "He's pretty open about it."

"Huh, maybe I should be talking to him." She jokingly moves to walk past him, but he puts his arm out to catch her before she can. He looks down at her, close enough that his nose almost touches her temple. Clarke's breath catches in her throat.

Lowly, he says, "I'm glad you told me."

She tilts her head ever-so-slightly to meet his eyes, a smile dusting across her lips. "I'm glad you're not a judgemental asshole."

"Oh, don't worry, I am. Only about things that matter, though. Like actually enjoying Coldplay."

Clarke's eyes widen, and her smile becomes a grin. "Okay, I like  _two_ of their songs. You can let it go."

He shakes his head. There's laughter in his voice as his mouth dips closer to her ear to warn, "Never. It's  _Coldplay_ , Griffin. I'm just thankful it's not Nickelback."

"They aren't even on the same  _level_ —"

The clearing of a throat interrupts Clarke's retort, and she blinks, remembering all of a sudden that Wick is working the shift with them. Slowly, she turns her head to see him watching the two of them, obviously a little confused. 

He points at the Synesso to Bellamy's left. "I need to make a latte, but I could wait."

"Why would you need to wait?" Bellamy asks, releasing Clarke and stepping away. His wicked grin has faded somewhat with the disruption, and Clarke isn't too pleased either, but she hopes it doesn't show.

Wick looks between her and Bellamy, eyes narrowing. He slowly says, "No reason."

"Alright." Bellamy stares at him for a moment, as if daring him to comment further, then picks up his clipboard again and clicks his pen a total of fifteen times. "Make your latte. Clarke, follow me to the tea drawers. We can start there instead."

The dubious look on Wick's face is priceless, and Clarke tries not to laugh as she slips around him and heads to the other end of the coffee bar. Bellamy has hopped up on the back counter and his tatty old sneakers knock against the salad fridge underneath it. He circles something on the review sheet, then says, "What's your favorite tea, Griffin?"

Their earlier conversation evidently set aside, Clarke leans against the counter opposite, under which are the tea drawers, separated into green, black, and herbal. She doesn't need to look at them to say, "I don't have a favorite tea."

He looks up from his paper to give her a caustic look. "Are you trying to tell me you don't like tea?"

"Trying implies failure. I clearly got my point across."

He rolls his eyes. "Then I recommend you find one."

"Why?"

He slides off the counter and kicks lightly at her legs to get her to move. "Tea makes people feel like they're making a healthy choice. Coffee is a bitter, destructive drink, while tea rejuvenates and cleanses."

"Technically, coffee is acidic. Bitter is a flavor more closely associated with basic substances." Four years completing a degree in biochemistry has taken its toll.

Bellamy sighs and mutters something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like, "How am I even attracted to you?" He proceeds to give her a look and say at a regular volume, "I'm not teaching chem class here."

Clarke shrugs. "Obviously that's for a reason."

He elbows her in the side, but he's stifling a grin. "Stop it. I'm trying to get to a point here."

She crosses her arms over her chest and gestures with her head for him to continue. After a second, he does. "I want you to remember that while this is technically a coffee shop, tea is still a major part of the business. We've got thirty-one different types of tea in these drawers, and I'm going to guess that you can probably name four of them. When people come to the cash and they don't know what they want, or they ask for suggestions, you need to be able to talk about tea just as well as you talk about coffee."

"How am I supposed to learn about thirty-one different types of tea?" Clarke demands. "Which, by the way, seems like an excessive amount of variation."

Bellamy smacks his fist into his forehead, pushing his pen out like a unicorn horn. "Am I talking to myself here, Griffin?  _Choose a favorite tea_. Actually, choose three, one from each of these categories. Know about it, how it's made. These are all fair-trade—that's always a selling point. There's a reason we have a tea menu, because no one in their right mind would want to memorize thirty-one types of tea. Except for Miller." At Clarke's confused and somewhat surprised look, he gives a nod. "Yeah, that guy has a lot of weird knowledge subsets. You should ask him about the origins of babushka dolls. It's kind of eerie."

Clarke files the information away under "Stuff She Never Knew She Needed To Know" and returns to the lesson at hand. "So if I were to ask you what your favorite teas are, what would you say?"

"You can't steal them. I actually like them; it would be greatly offensive if you were to use them without actually meaning it," he threatens. Clarke mimes zipping her mouth shut and throwing away the key. When he decides she's being serious, he says, "Masala chai is my favorite black. Then our jasmine-infused green, then our mountain flower-lemon herbal."

Clarke makes an appreciative noise in the back of her throat. "Very impressive."

"That's the point." He uses the clipboard to gesture at the coffee shop. It's actually busy for once, since it's the morning. Clarke watches Bellamy's face closely, watching the minute shifts of his expression as he notices regulars eating breakfast or meeting friends. He looks oddly at peace in the midst of the loud shop. In a tone of surprising emotion, he says, "We're the gatekeepers of new experiences, Griffin. And I don't care how dumb it sounds, we should want to make that a little bit easier for them. People need to be guided to what they want. They need to try new things to feel like they're not wasting their time. And sometimes, it helps to feel a little bit like a snob. That's why lapsang souchong tea exists, Clarke, because I guarantee you that no one actually likes that shit without putting in a lot of time and effort, all for the ability to say that their tastes are just a little bit more refined than the person next to them. And that's okay. People need a little superiority in their lives to make it through the day, and that's part of our job too."

"How are you legitimately passionate about this place?" Clarke asks.

"It's a long story."

"I like long stories."

He looks down at her again, and she realizes that she really,  _really_ wants to kiss him right now. When his eyes flicker down to her mouth, she sways forward an inch; his hand is on her hip, fingers curling in her belt loop to pull her even closer, nose brushing hers. She can feel every heartbeat resonate in her chest. Then, someone drops a plate and it shatters. The sound startles Clarke back to her senses, and she pulls back. She bites her lower lip and glances over her shoulder to see Wick wiping down the milk fridge. He can't clean up the mess, and Clarke hasn't gotten clearance to work with sharps disposal yet, so Bellamy will have to deal with it. They were getting distracted.

And as much as Clarke likes the idea of getting distracted, she unfortunately has a job to do too.

"Alright, three favorite teas. I'll get right on that," she says, turning back to Bellamy. The moment has passed, and they both know it. She jerks her thumb at the mess by the seating area. "Better do damage control."

He glances out to judge the situation, then sighs and says, "Why do they always try to clean it up? A broken plate is not worth getting sued over if something happens. People are idiots."

"What happened to us being benevolent gatekeepers?"

He laughs. "I never said anything about being benevolent, Griffin."

With that, he steps out from behind the counter and calls across the shop to the woman who is, as he said, trying to pick up the pieces of the plate. Clarke smiles as she watches him negotiate with her, then sucks in a breath and heads back to work.

 

It feels like forever before she gets back to Bellamy's review, but it's really only about an hour and a half. After the broken plate, there was a sudden influx of customers, which brought with it an influx of dishes and the need to grind new beans and restock the product shelves. That didn't stop Clarke from having a good time; Wick is one of the better people to be on shift with, and he and Bellamy have clearly been working together for a while because they work off each other like old friends.

Still, she's happy when Bellamy taps her arm and points at the Synesso for the next part of their review. With Wick around, nothing can happen, which is currently threatening to drive her insane, but it's definitely better than nothing. He's on break at the moment, but every so often he pops back out to grab a cookie which he promises he'll mark down as "broken" on the waste sheet. Clarke doubts that very much.

Bellamy clicks his pen. Clarke has given up on efforts to make him stop. "The second part of lesson is about something you've probably seen enough of on social media: latte art. While our shop technically doesn't have any requirements for latte art, it's still a good tool to have, and it has been proven in studies that people will think that coffee with art tastes better than coffee without. And it's a very good sign of passion, which translates into customer care and return service."

He waits for Clarke to nod her understanding before pointing at the espresso machine. "Pull me a double and I'll get the milk going."

She does as he says, setting up one of the latte mugs underneath the grouphead. By the time the espresso is done, Bellamy's just finishing up with the milk, so he grabs the mug and shuts off the steam wand in quick order. He tilts the cup towards her. "How you stretch the milk is important here. Too much foam will make the milk too stiff to work with, and too little doesn't give you anything to work with. Start like you normally do, then bring the tip of the pitcher close to the surface."

He demonstrates, continuing to speak as he prepares the latte. "Rock it from side to side—the current will do the rest to spread out the design—then drag it back when you're nearly done and voilà."

The latte he places in her hands is textbook perfect, and from the grin on his face, he is very aware of that fact.

Clarke arches an eyebrow at him. "You make it sound easy."

"That's because it is."

The second eyebrow shoots up. "Wanna bet?"

Before he has the chance to answer, she starts a shot pulling and starts steaming milk. When she goes to make the latte, she talks as she works: "Close to the surface, rock it, drag it back, and . . . it's hideous."

Bellamy looks over her shoulder. "Kinda looks like a dick, actually."

Clarke tilted her head a little. "Yeah, if you're looking at it like that."

"Don't serve people dicks, Griffin." Bellamy snags the coffee from her hands and takes a sip. "It takes some practice, but it's not as hard as you think. Plus, I'll tell you a little secret about latte art—as long as there's something like art on it, people will think you meant it."

"What do you mean?"

He grins. "I mean I once fucked up a latte and nearly whited it out, and the person I gave it to thought it was a squirrel and took a picture of it right in front of me."

"Did it look like a squirrel?"

"Not as much as your design looked like a dick."

Clarke shoves him lightly, nearly spilling his phallic coffee. "You're an ass."

He's trying to hold back laughter and not succeeding. "What? I'm giving you a compliment! The dick was perfectly executed!"

"Just grab the cash and shut up."

Bellamy actually laughs at that, then sets his latte to the side and heads over to take the waiting customers' orders. After a second, he calls out a small latte for here and a tea that he says he's got covered. Clarke makes the espresso, then, warily, follows Bellamy's instructions again.

Her hand shakes. The leaf is gone. In its place is something that looks oddly like—

"Nice four-leaf clover, Clarke," Wick says, appearing at her shoulder. She slides the coffee over to the customer, who immediately takes it to the condiments stand and stirs in a heap of sugar without even looking at the latte. Clarke holds in a sigh and goes to rinse out the pitcher instead of crying over her perfect (accidental) clover being wasted.

Bellamy comes up beside her at the sink. When she dries her hands, he nudges her aside to wash his hands and whispers, "Did you really mean to make a four-leaf clover?"

Clarke starts into a "no," but he rolls his eyes and says, "I know you didn't. My point is that it is literally impossible to fuck up latte art."

"What about when you make a dick?"

He flicks water at her, causing her to duck. "You've got a weird fixation on male genitalia, Griffin."

"I do  _not._ "

"Then go practice, because if you keep making dicks, I'm gonna start thinking that you do."

She tosses the rest of the water left in her pitcher on him, then heads back over to the Synesso.

 

Bellamy snaps his fingers in front of Clarke's face, drawing her eyes away from the clock on the wall slowly ticking down to twelve and the end of her shift. It takes her a moment to focus on his face. Her hand rests on the grouphead handle, halfway through flushing it out. Bellamy flicks the handle back, and the stream of water shuts off. "Hey, Hiccup, you're still on the job for the next three minutes."

"Hiccup?"

He looks disappointed and explains, "How to Train Your Dragon? He's always flying on his dragon, his head's in the clouds . . . ? Any of this ringing a bell?"

"I just can't believe you referenced a kid's movie and didn't flinch." The smile on her face softens the blow a little.

"That movie has a lot of levels, and if you can't appreciate it, then I don't think I can ask you what I'm about to ask you."

He starts to turn away, but she grabs his apron to keep him in place, causing it to loosen. His eyes go past her to someone who walks up behind her, and she feels a light tap on her arm. She glances back. "Monty?"

"You're flirting in my way," he says, then winks at Bellamy.

"We're not—"

"We'll just get out of your way," Bellamy interrupts, pulling Clarke further to the side and allowing Monty the room to get behind the counter. He slips past them to the sink, where Wick wipes a streak of coffee grounds down his face from one of the filters he's replacing, cackling.

Clarke turns back to Bellamy, who's watching her with dark eyes. Her pulse automatically shoots up a notch. "What did you want to ask me?"

He looks down at his hands. "I was wondering if you wanted to get a drink tonight.  _Not_ coffee, obviously. And there's this dumb artsy movie playing in the park that my sister's dragging me to, and if you came as my date, I think I might actually be able to make it out alive—"

The clock by the fridge beeps at the hour, cutting him off. Clarke freezes, her good humor fading. The noise in the coffee shop is suddenly overwhelmingly loud. She ducks her head and starts taking off her apron. "My shift's over, and I should really get going."

"Clarke—"

She hurriedly makes her way to the back office. Behind her, she hears Bellamy call, "Wick, hold the fort a sec."

She doesn't hear Wick's answer through the door that closes behind her. In a rush, she clocks out, and she's grabbing her purse when Bellamy opens the door, momentarily letting the noise back in before plunging them back into near-silence when it slams back to its frame. His apron is falling off, so he yanks the tie loose and tosses it onto the desk to keep it out of his way without breaking eye contact. Clarke's heart is thudding in her chest.

He takes a step forward. "Look, Clarke, I get that it's pretty much none of my business, and maybe you don't want to talk about it, but I need to know—is this because of your ex? Or have I just been reading into the signs too much?"

Clarke licks her lips. Sucks in a breath. Readies herself. Lies. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Like hell you don't," he shoots back. "I ask you out and you run away as fast as you can, and maybe it's stupid, but I want to know if it's because of her or because of me. Because I . . . I like you, Clarke. Probably more than is strictly reasonable, but it's the truth, and I thought that maybe you might feel the same way, except the moment I mentioned doing something about it, you literally fled my presence."

"Bellamy, it's not that simple," Clarke sighs, but he's right, and it hurts her a little. The fact that she's running from what she wants because of a ghost.

"Try to make it simple for me, then," he replies, moving closer still. Clarke's hand is clutching her bag, the strap dangling forgotten by her legs.

She stares at him, trying to figure out when the wanting of him became something more. Something that excites her but scares her too. All because of  _her_. Should she tell him? She doesn't know if it'll help him any, but she does know that answer to her question should be yes. Without a doubt. She bottled it up for a year and hasn't told a single soul, and now he's  _asking_ , he's actually asking to know.

Her throat tightens. Bellamy's watching her, waiting. Clarke looks away. "It's a long story."

"Believe me, I've got the time."

She takes a moment to breathe. Then, like ripping off a band-aid, she starts into it. "Last summer, I was questioning my degree. I was on a path to become a doctor, and clearly, since I'm going to med school in the fall, I still am, but I didn't know if I wanted to do that. I'd gotten into art school. I didn't know if I'd made the right choice. I wanted . . . I wanted to escape my choices, so I rented an apartment by the beach, and I painted every night.

"One night, I was walking the surf, and I met a girl. Her name was Lexa." Clarke pauses at her name. "I fell in love. She told me she was in love too. She was a budding actress, and she would always tell me about how there were twenty auditions a day in L.A., if she could only make it there one day, she'd be a star within a year. She was a real free spirit, not the flaky free spirit I was trying and failing to be. She got money from singing in bars, and after her shows, we'd drink until the sun came up and we'd collapse at our apartment and never question a thing."

Bellamy's jaw is set. Clarke can't read his expression, but she can't stop now. "I didn't know too much about her, but I thought that it added to it, almost. Like it was our very souls that were in love, and nothing else mattered. It was a blur of a summer, and I didn't even know if I wanted to go back to school. I thought I could stay with her, maybe forever, just living in that alcohol-fueled limbo with her. But the week before class started again, I woke up . . . and she wasn't there anymore. I didn't understand at first, but I saw she left a note. She said she'd had a lot of fun, but her agent had a casting call for her if she made it to L.A. by the next day. She took my car and drove off in the middle of the night, and that was it."

Clarke takes in a heavy breath, feeling her shoulders shudder as a weight seems to lift from them. "I went back to class, and I told myself that I would never make the mistake of falling in love with someone I didn't know again. And that worked for a while."

 _Until I met you_ hung in the air between them, unsaid but as loud as if she spoke the words. Clarke's story over, she falls silent, waiting, scanning Bellamy's face for any sign of reaction. She waits for long enough to worry, until he tilts his head and says, "So that whole 'I don't even know you' thing, that was actually a serious issue."

Clarke interprets the response as him mocking her, and she drags her hand over her face, pressing her eyes shut as she tries to keep from crying.  _They'd been doing so well_. "I shouldn't have ever told you—"

"My birthday is May 15th. I'm finishing a master's in criminology, and the FBI wants me to be a profiler for them when I finish, which is both cool and a little scary since I'll be sitting directly under Big Brother's eye. My sister is four years younger than me, and I've been watching out for her my whole life, ever since my dad left after she was born. I don't really like chocolate chip cookies, but Octavia loves them, so I make excellent ones."

He takes a pause in his spiel when he sees the look Clarke is giving him—half-disbelieving, half-amused. A smile creeps onto his face. "And when you asked why I'm so passionate about this place, I wasn't lying when I said it was a long story, but since you gave me a long story, I should give you one too. I'm passionate because I've been working here since the tenth grade. That's about nine years now. My mom . . . has this thing where she spends too much of her paycheck on alcohol and not enough on the rent. Or clothes."

Clarke's eyes widen. His tone is nonchalant, almost like he's narrating something he saw once on television. "It started after my dad left, and it got pretty bad when my sister started spending more away from the house in middle school, so I needed to pick up some extra money. Usually it went to rent. Once, Octavia really wanted a pet rabbit, so I got that too. The rabbit died last year, if you're wondering. Lasted a good long while, so I'd call it a good investment. But basically, every spare moment of my time was spent at this old place, so I got a little attached. Been here longer than anyone, except Kane, since he owns the place."

He walks over to her, close enough that she has to tilt her head back to meet his eyes. He's smiling, but Clarke can tell the story took as much out of him as her story took out of her. She grabs his hand and squeezes it. Casually, almost like it's an old habit, he leans his head down and rests his forehead against hers. "It's not everything, but it's enough to start with, right?"

"Well, I mean, you're a Taurus, and I'm an Aries, so that's a little bit of an issue." Clarke laughs when his jaw drops. "I'm kidding."

"That's so like an Aries," he replies, but the moment of absurd panic has disappeared from his eyes.

"Asshole."

He uses her hands to pull her a little closer. Their knees knock against each other. "You're a little bit of an asshole yourself, Griffin."

She gapes at him. "Where's this coming from?"

"You called me asshole like a million times today," he counters. "You've got to be at least ten percent asshole yourself to do that."

"Ten percent asshole?" The feeling in Clarke's chest is threatening to overtake her—a glowing feeling, like sunlight or hot butterscotch, that's wiping away all the tension and grief that her memories of Lexa had brought with them. A voice at the back of her head says something she thinks she knew for a long time:  _Bellamy isn't like Lexa_. Which, for now, is good enough.

"Do you want me to do the math for you? Because I can, if you really want. It's a simple substitution equation,  _x_ representing the number of times you called me an ass—"

Clarke wraps her arms around his neck and pulls his mouth down to hers. For a moment, he's too surprised to do anything, but then his lips move against hers and they slide into place. One of his hands presses into the small of her back to bring her even nearer, while the other moves up to rest against her collarbone, thumb tracing over the hollow of her throat. Clarke feels him smile against her mouth. The sunlight in her chest turns to liquid gold, hot and brilliant. He draws back just enough for their lips to barely brush as he speaks, and clarifies, "So you don't want to hear my math?"

"Did you actually have any math, or were you just planning on running your mouth off until I made you stop?" she asks.

"Fair enough." He brings his mouth back to hers with a grin. His fingers brush against her jaw before moving up to cup the side of her face and slide into her hair, holding her to him. All the imagined moments Clarke thought up when they nearly kissed, the half-finished musings on what it would be like, all pale in comparison to the real thing, the real moment. He's warmer than she thought, she can feel it through her shirt, or maybe she's just cold—has been cold for a while, and forgot what real warmth feels like. His breath tastes like the mint tea he made himself earlier, and she knows he must taste the espresso on her lips when his tongue traces over her teeth. From the way her body's reacting, it's like she's never kissed anyone before—her chest feels tight with exhilaration, her hands feel hot as they slide down to grab his shoulders, she can't keep from sighing against his mouth as his hand slips beneath the hem of her uniform shirt to skim across her skin.

But Bellamy was right: Clarke is a little bit of an asshole. So instead of staying there and kissing him (forever), she pulls back abruptly and clears her throat. Her heart is pounding, and from the flush on Bellamy's cheeks, his pulse is racing too. "I've actually got somewhere to be."

The look on his face is priceless. "Are you serious?"

"Unfortunately. My mom's taking me shopping, then we're going to dinner with my dad and some family friends. I think they're trying to set me up with one of their sons."

He narrows his eyes at her. "Are they going to succeed?"

Clarke presses a quick kiss to the corner of his mouth. "You jealous?"

She slips out of his arms to grab her jacket, but he catches her hand at the last second and pulls her back. He taps his nose against hers. "Should I not be?"

A grin appears on her lips, which feel overly-sensitive after the kiss. "Don't worry, Finn's only a lawyer. Not a barista like you."

"Okay, you're definitely more than ten percent asshole."

Clarke laughs—because yes, she is, and they both know it—and manages to snag her jacket and escape Bellamy's embrace before Raven walks in. Clarke shrugs it on, ducking the purse that Raven chucks at the employee shelf. She can't seem to stop smiling, which isn't helped when she looks at Raven and remembers the exchange she heard that morning concerning her and Wick. She wants to say something, but she doesn't know if Raven would want Bellamy to know, so she resolves to do it another time. With a knowing look at her supervisor, she says, "I'll see you tomorrow for our close."

"We've got a close?" Which means that they'll be alone. In an empty shop.

Clarke ducks out the door, leaving him with the wordless promise. She can hear Raven as the door closes, offering up a comment she's not supposed to hear: "Glad to see you're on top of things, Blake. You think you're actually gonna get around to making a move on her tomorrow?"

"You can just . . . shut your mouth, Reyes."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ehh heh doN't kill me i'm very aware how late this is  
> but consider it a late christmas present?  
> also please let me know how that whole third "scene" went, because honestly i'm not so sure and i kinda want some feedback bc i'm not sure if the emotion was really there?? and maybe i shouldn't be doubting my own work aloud but hey honesty is the best policy. also again if i haven't replied to comments yet, it's because i am a fucking idiot and i swear i've read them all i just never replied because, again, fucking idiot here  
> anyway, hope you guys enjoyed it!
> 
> (only two chapters left: day five, and the epilogue)


	5. stay in control

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> um.  
> sorry.  
> (so so sorry.)

It’s a hot day, the day of their close.

Clarke takes the back door just because the trees on the road around the back are bigger and cast longer shadows, hopping from one to the other like a game of hide and seek with the sun. Her legs are sticky under her skirt; the dress code policy is fingertips or below, and all her long shorts somehow ended up in the wash at the same time. When she reaches the cool, air-conditioned bliss of the coffee shop, she nearly collapses then and there.

The main thing that stops her from doing just that is Octavia and Lincoln stumbling out of the back, arms wrapped around each other and lips locked. They nearly careen into her, forcing a preemptive “Hey!” from her mouth.

Octavia breaks away from her boyfriend just long enough to beam at her. “Hey to you too, Griffin.”

“You know that’s not her name, right, babe?” Lincoln murmurs, giving his coworker a quiet smile in greeting.

“Griffin is way better than Clarke,” Octavia returns, before glancing sidelong at the person in question with semi-apologetic expression. “Sorry to break it to you.”

“I’ll try to come to terms with it,” Clarke says, unable to reign in her grin. “Can I get to the back, please?”

Lincoln herds Octavia out the back door, his strong hands somehow controlling the small but wild girl between them. Clarke finds herself wishing she’ll have more shifts with him in the future; surely the coffee shop could never get rowdy or busy with him around.

The apron hitting her in the face snaps the back hallway back into focus, and she looks up to see Monty heading towards her. “Would you quit standing around and clock in already? I’ve got places to be.”

“What, like your parents’ basement?”

“What, like you’re too good for your parents’ basement?” He smiles at her, a wry look in his eyes. “And I’m going to the library.”

“Oh, that’s much better,” Clarke teases, punching in the code for the office and heading in, Monty a step behind. She tosses her purse onto one of the boxes of to-go cups and sits down to clock in.

Monty is already grabbing his things, his apron currently in Clarke’s lap already. He’s checking his phone when he says, “Last training day, right?”

Clarke nods, which he catches from the corner of his eye.

“So you’ve survived five whole shifts with Bellamy. A trial by fire, huh?” He reaches over her once she’s clocked in so that he can clock out.

Clarke maneuvers herself out of the chair and ties the apron around her waist. She shrugs, mind instantly returning to the last night, remembering the sensation of Bellamy’s mouth, hot against hers. “Something like that.”

Monty side-eyes her in a way that says he sees right through her. “Just don’t do it in here, okay? It makes the air feel weird.”

“It does _what_?”

“I’m just saying, I’ll know.” He looks her head on, all false solemnity. “God is watching.”

Clarke rolls her eyes and heads for the door. “Then maybe we should give him a show.”

“Not what I wanted you to take from that, Clarke!” he calls out, but the door is already closing behind her.

The sounds of the shop, which had been muffled in the back, return in full force. It’s a busy evening, as Saturday nights usually are, Raven has told her. Coffee dates, families wandering around to browse the shops that line the streets, authors trying to hit their word counts before the spirit leaves them, all flock to the shop as a warm twilight settles over the city. But even through all the noise, the bustle, the conversations, the first voice that rings clear is still his.

He’s chatting easily with the man at the counter, smile congenial and tone bright. Across the shop, she meets his eyes; his smile broadens, brightens. She feels herself do the same without meaning to.

She slips behind the counter just as the man’s order comes through, and leaves it to Bellamy so she can wash her hands to start her shift. As she brushes by him, she feels his hand glance off her hip, subtly but purposely, and her heart jumps a little in her chest. She swallows the feeling as she shoves her hands under ice-cold water, the temperature startling her the rest of the way out of it.

She’s only just finished drying her hands when Bellamy slides the coffee - what looks like a perfect cappuccino from where Clarke’s standing - along to the customer and comes to rest against the back counter next to her. They both face the shop, not looking at each other, but Clarke is acutely aware of their legs touching, his fingers nudging hers on the counter behind them.

“So.”

“So,” she repeats.

“How was your date last night?”

She whips her head around to look at him. His mouth is curved up mischievously, a twinkle in his eyes. She knocks her shoulder into him. “Amazing. Phenomenal.”

“Truly breathtaking?”

“Yep.” She sighs and shifts her feet. “Dinner with Finn ‘The Peacemaker’ Collins was probably the best dinner of my life, in fact.”

“Oh, is that right?” he asks, playing along. He tosses his hair back with excessive flair. “The Peacemaker. Sounds . . . sexy.”

“Mhmm. And the sweater vest. . . .” Clarke brings her thumb and pointer finger together in a circle, making a noise at the back of her throat. “I mean, that was definitely the cherry on top.”

It’s Bellamy’s turn to knock shoulders. He laughs low in his throat, the sound quiet, as though it’s reserved just for her ears. His voice is far nearer and softer as he says, “My competition sounds fierce.”

Clarke turns to look at him again, and their noses brush. For a moment, neither of them move, just breathing each other in. His fingers twine with hers, nails scratching at the counter. Then, Monty slams his bag down on the counter in front of them and clears his throat in a very obvious way.

Bellamy blinks slowly and moves his head just enough to meet Monty’s eyes. “Can I get you something?”

“Yeah, large lemongrass iced tea for my comp. Hey, one of you could make it, and the other could ring me through.” He grins cheekily.

Clarke holds in a deep breath and pushes Bellamy lightly towards the fridge. “I’ll put it through, you get the tea.”

As Bellamy reluctantly shuffles along, Monty gives Clarke an exaggeratedly innocent look. “Oh, I wasn’t . . . _interrupting_ anything, was I?”

“You gonna stick around all night?”

“Can I trust you two to keep it in your pants?”

“This isn’t dinner and a show, Monty.” When that doesn’t convince him, she adds, “We’ll keep it PG.”

“I’d prefer G, but I’ll take it,” he says, just as Bellamy hands him his tea. He looks between the two of them, then continues, “I hope you use protection.”

“Get out of here,” Bellamy snorts, as Clarke groans. Monty acknowledges his cue to leave and gets out accordingly, before Bellamy reels back and Clarke hears the telltale sound of a pen clicking twelve times in quick succession.

She pivots to face him, eyebrows raised. “Right to the clipboard?”

Bellamy shrugs, as though he can’t control his actions. “Just because it’s your last session doesn’t mean I don’t have a lesson plan.”

“You sound like a substitute teacher.”

“Hey, hey, at least I’m not a sweater-vest-wearing lawyer called The Peacemaker,” Bellamy tosses back, glancing down at the clipboard with a grin. “What kind of nickname is that, by the way?”

Clarke thinks back to the night before, recalling the story straight from Finn’s lips. “He wants to go into international law, so he's going to have a lot to do with peacemaking and treaties along the way. I’m fairly certain he took the nickname on himself. That, or his mother started calling him that. Either way, it spread.”

“Well, I’m gonna call him The Treaty Man, just to piss him off,” Bellamy scoffs.

Clarke narrows her eyes. “When do you suppose you’re going to call him that?”

“When we inevitably meet to duel for your heart.” He peeks up at her through his curls, which have fallen into his face. “I plan on winning, by the way.”

“If either of you even try, I’ll kick both your asses and leave it at that.”

Bellamy grins at her before turning back to his list for a moment to finish writing something. For a moment, there’s only the scratch of a pen between them, and Clarke takes the time to look him over again, from his curly hair to the scuffed sneakers on his feet. Thinking back to the day they first met, she has to ask, “Why did you decide to stop being an asshole to me?”

“I like to think I’ve been an ongoing asshole to you, so this is a disappointing question to get,” he says, before looking at her. “Do you mean on our second day?”

Clarke nods her yes.

He clicks his pen only once, which Clarke takes as a sign that he’s seriously considering his answer. After what feels like almost a minute, he quickly draws in a breath and says, “I’m trying to find a way to say this that doesn’t sound creepy.”

“Creepy?”

“Well, to say that I liked you from the moment I met you sounds a little serial-killer-y, doesn’t it?” he replies. “I obviously don’t mean the _exact_ moment, but I don’t really know which moment it was. All I know is that something on that first day, something made me realize I didn’t want to annoy you too much.”

“You kinda did.”

“I couldn’t just stop being an asshole all of a sudden. You’d have thought I was just hiding my assholeyness to be a bigger asshole.” When he says it, she knows it’s true, so she lets it slide. “So I decided day two would be different.”

Clarke’s eyes rove across his face, taking in the earnest slant of his eyes, the small parting of his lips, and realizes she feels the same. She doesn’t know when she started to want him, want to be near him. All she knows is that last week, she wanted to fling him into the sun, and this week, she doesn’t. (She might want to fling him somewhere else, though, possibly into her bed.)

Bellamy clicks his pen five times, and her thoughts right themselves. He flips the board so she can see his messy scrawl. “Today’s title is Stay In Control. Do with that what you will.”

Clarke peers at the checklist, which has been scribbled over and colored in to the point that she can hardly read it anymore. “What’s it about?”

“Calibration, for the most part. And a tandem bar practice.” He runs his eyes over the checklist one last time, as though he can actually read it through the mess he’s created, then nods to himself. “I’m going to ask you to look away while I screw with the espresso grinder.”

Clarke blinks at him once, then blows out her cheeks and does as he says. She hears him move over the grinder, muttering to himself something about adding something to the lesson plan. A customer moves up to the cash and luckily orders tea, so Clarke gets it for her while Bellamy continues to fiddle.

A little while later, he claps his hands, bringing Clarke’s attention over to him. He’s grinning wickedly - never a good sign with Bellamy. “You ready?”

She raises a single eyebrow in response, but joins him by the grinder all the same. He leans into her a little, his chest resting against her shoulder so that he can bring his head to her ear. “You do well today and I promise we’ll do something fun at the end of the day.”

“I like fun things,” Clarke replies, voice breathier than she intended. She clears her throat and grips the lever that stick out from the machine almost at eye-level. “Let’s get to it, then.”

“That’s the spirit,” he says, stepping back as he notices how some of the patrons are eyeing them. “Alright. Each shot has to weigh a certain amount, but as the day goes on, the grinder tends to fall out of that pattern, according to the laws of entropy. It is our duty as the caretakers of the coffee to make sure this doesn’t happen. Let’s start by getting you to weigh out a shot’s worth of grinds, and we’ll go from there.”

* * *

Nearly two hours and six different grinder calibrations later, Clarke is now both thoroughly versed in grinder maintenance and consumed by hatred for the machine.

Bellamy, for his part, seems to be enjoying himself just a little bit too much. He said the lesson was called Stay In Control because he wanted her to learn how to control as much of the coffee-making equipment as possible, but he seems to have added a second level to the title. Every so often, as she’s focused on moving the lever over by a fraction of an inch, he’ll brush his fingers along her side or dip his mouth to her neck for the briefest of seconds, dissolving her concentration and sending sparks pulsing through her body.

She doesn’t even get the satisfaction of returning the favor, since the moment she finishes calibrating the machine, Bellamy casually walks past it and smacks the lever out of whack again and she has to go right back to the beginning. Currently, “Stay In Control” is just a funny little euphemism for “Don’t Kill or Fuck Bellamy,” both of which seem equally possible at this point.

Finally, as the clock inches near seven, they call it quits, Bellamy turning to his clipboard and Clarke running to the sink to run her hands under cold water. The work has made them overly hot, which isn’t helped by the memory of the sweltering evening out the front windows or the continued presence of one Bellamy Blake.

He sidles up next to her at the sink, laughter in his voice. “You good, Griffin?”

“Monty said to keep it G-rated, remember?” Clarke asks, drying her hands and turning into him, cocking her head. “You don’t seem to be playing by the rules.”  
“Monty isn’t here, and I make the rules, so nice try but no cigar,” he tells her. “And from what you’ve told me of your past, you don’t seem to like following the rules anyway.”

“And you’re going to be all about enforcing them, Mr. FBI.”

“Profiler _for_ the FBI, and I’m not doing it yet, so I think I’m still safe for a little while at least.” He steps back all the same, bringing the clipboard up between them like some sort of shield. “If you’re ready, though, we can try the tandem bar now. We’ve got the customers for it.”

Clarke glances up to see two people waiting at the cash, and two separate groups of people have just entered. “How do you tandem bar with two people on the shift?”

“Careful juggling. Get to work on Lizzie.” He jerked his head towards the bar, so that by the time he started taking the first order, she was already pulling a double shot. He called out the order just as it appeared on the machine. Clarke detached the stub and slid the drink over to the customer, then quickly finished the second drink for the next person in line.

She caught Bellamy’s eye, and he nodded slightly, and her eyes went to the first group of people, five-strong. They would just have to leave the second cluster (four people in this one) to wait a little while they finished the order that came before.

When the stubs for five separate drinks come up on the machine, Bellamy slides over, and suddenly they’re speaking in a shorthand Clarke didn’t even know she could speak.

“Shots and cold,” he says. “I’m on the wand.”

She immediately goes to pull shots for three of the drinks as Bellamy grabs the milk and starts up the steam wand. They work in solid motion, timers going and grinds knocking, the only words passing between them ones to indicate which shots belong to which drinks. Once Clarke finishes pulling, she ducks under Bellamy’s arm to the fridge to grab the tea bases, dodging his reaching hand as he goes for the soy milk. It doesn’t really feel like anything; it feels just like work, her focus solely on the task at hand (and not knocking into Bellamy), so when the final drink gets passed along, she has an odd feeling that tandem bar isn’t really anything at all.

Then Bellamy heads back to the cash, apologizing with an easy smile for the wait and getting easy smiles back. She’s envious of him, a little, just for the way he carries himself. The memory of their conversation yesterday is still fresh in her mind: he’s been here a long time. He knows this place, knows its ins and outs, knows how to charm customers and convince them, knows how to soothe every single bump and jitter that walks through this place. And Clarke thinks she knows why she is starting to fall for him the way that she is.

She has never been so at home in a place the way Bellamy is. Her mother was always moving her around as a kid, new houses when she worked in new hospitals, new clinics. She’s been in the city her whole life, but she’s never been home.

Bellamy feels like a home.

Lexa had been an escape. She’d been wild, and free, and unattached, and everything with her had felt like some sort of midnight ride, out under the stars with only the sounds of the tide coming in and the wind whistling in their hair to keep them company. And then she was gone just like as fast. Ever since Lexa, she’s felt lost. Confused, cast to sea, nothing to ground her but her promise to her mother. And looking at Bellamy here, in this place, she knows that above else, he is an anchor. Yes, maybe it’s the locale, or his history, or something else entirely, but she knows that he is a man she can hold to. He can sit down somewhere and find his place, because at the end of the day, Bellamy is, at his heart, a good man.

 _God_ , her heart hurt with it.

Suddenly, he’s in front of her again, a light in his eyes and stubs in his hand. “Ready for round two?”

A smile splits her face, and without thinking, she reaches up and pulls his mouth to hers. For a second, he freezes - yes, it’s Clarke’s turn to catch him off guard - then his arms go around her and draw her in, the line between them becoming well-defined and fading away at the same time as they breath each other in. His hair is soft between her fingers and her skin feels hot where he drags his fingers across it. She feels a tightness in her chest, a tether around her heart, crossing the short distance between them to his and pulling tight. Yes, this is what it is - this is what an anchor feels like.

Even with the espresso machine to partly hide them, the patrons behind the bar can still see them. One of them clears their throat, and Clarke and Bellamy spring apart. She feels a flush crawl up her neck, something like embarrassment but not as sharp as that. The tips of his ears are bright pink.

Clarke licks her lips, trying to catch her breath. In a overly bright voice, she says, “Yes. Round two. Good plan.”

This time, he nudges her towards the fridge for the milk. Less customers means less of a rush, if only just, and while she understands him keeping her off the milk for the last group, she also needs to practice. She starts steaming, watching his hands work with Lizzie, and it falls into place: the person getting the shots, whoever that is, they’re doing the grunt work. They’re running around, knocking, grinding, pulling. They don’t see the drinks to completion.

Clarke, on the other hand, carries through. She sees the smile on each of their faces as she passes the customers their drinks, she completes the work left half finished by Bellamy before her, and it _works_. Now Clarke is in control.

She likes it.

As the customers move off with their orders, Clarke collapses against the back counter, shoving aside some of the used milk pitchers. Bellamy is beside her in a second. They don’t speak for a brief moment.

He turns to her. “Not that I’m complaining or anything, but could you tell me what that was about?”

She looks at him, scanning his face, taking him in. “I think I like you, Bellamy Blake.”

“I think we’ve already established that I like you too, Clarke Griffin.”

Clarke leans in conspiratorially. “I think I might _like_ like you.”

“ _Like_ like me?” Bellamy moves in closer, his forehead coming to rest against hers. Their eyes lock. Voice barely above a whisper, he says, “I think I do to.”

Her need for him courses through her veins. She glances at the clock. “How long until this stupid shift ends?”

“An hour.”

“How much money do you think we’d make before nine anyways?”

Bellamy peeks around the shop. Most of the people have cleared out as the dusk presses up on the windows, the sound of chatter from bars down the street a low undercurrent audible even from where they stand. “Whatever ten customers brings.”

Clarke bites her lip, eyeing him. “How mad would Kane be if we closed early, then?”

“Mad.” Just as Clarke is about to sigh and get back to work, his hand brushes against her arm. “But I thought I said I make the rules here.”

Clarke’s heart stutters. That mischievous, troublesome look is back in his eyes, and he mutters, “Stay here.”

With that, he’s gone. He stops by all the occupied tables, and Clarke overhears snippets of their interactions, words here and there that she pieces together to understand he’s telling them there’s been a family emergency and he has to leave. It would be breaking store policy to be open with only one member of staff left behind. Unfortunately, he has to close down the store.

He gets a lot of sympathetic looks, and Clarke wonders how many of these people are regulars - she hasn’t been around long enough to know. If they are, what will he tell them when they see him again? Knowing Bellamy, he’ll think of something.

As he shoos the last of them out, he closes down the front windows too, the metal slats sliding down with a clang. As he locks up, he calls back, “You wanna get out of here?”

“Do we have to?”

He pulls off his apron and heads back to her, a wry look on his face. Bringing back their conversation from their second shift together, he asks in return, “Do you find rabbit holes particularly erotic?”

“Okay, that story can’t have been true.”

He shrugs. “Partially. Not the rabbit hole bit, you understand.”

“You’re kidding.”

Without warning, he lunges forward and scoops her up, his arms going around her waist and lifting her just enough so that her toes flutter above the floor. His mouth dances tantalizingly close to hers. She swallows, trying to clear her throat, but her voice still catches as she says, “You can kiss me now.”

“Oh, you can kiss me whenever you want, but I have to do it on command?” he demands playfully, but his voice has deepened. His eyes circle down to her lips, and they shift, finding their place, aligning. Her toes touch the floor again as his mouth comes languidly down to hers.

They’re soft kisses at first, like the first plodding drops of rain before a storm, their lips coming together and pulling apart again and again. Clarke’s hands rest on his chest, the only things separating them apart from their clothes; they slide up, chest to shoulders to neck to hair once more. God, she loves his hair. Her fingers tangle, tug tight. Bellamy makes a noise low in his throat, his hands splaying against her back and pressing her closer, and the kiss changes.

They lock into place, like they’ve finally found the right fit. Clarke’s lips part, allowing Bellamy in, tasting faintly of the jasmine tea he had earlier. Suddenly it isn’t enough; she twists in his grasp, and he’s right there with her, his fingers going to the knot in her apron and making quick work of it. It falls to the floor between them, and Bellamy kicks it away. Against his mouth, Clarke murmurs, “We’re going to have to deal with that when we mop up.”

“I love it when you talk shop,” he says, a grin in his voice. Abruptly, he breaks away from her, his mouth back on her in a second, pressing searing, bruising kisses along her jaw until he reaches the place where her jaw meets her throat. She feels his teeth graze her skin, which, combined with the heady sensation of his heart beating in time with hers, sends electricity skittering across her skin. His hands ruck up her shirt, pulling it out from the waistband of her skirt, and suddenly his hands are against her bare skin. Clarke’s breath hitches, comes out in a gasp.

“Take it off,” she sighs, and Bellamy works his way back so that his face is right above hers. His lips are dark, his pupils dilated; Clarke can only imagine she’s in a similar state.

His lips brush hers as he teasingly asks, “What’s the magic word?”

Before she can answer him - either with sarcasm or the correct response - his hands drop to her ass and lift, and suddenly she’s in the air again. Fluidly, as though he’s done it a million times before, Bellamy walks them over to a table. When he sets her down, she barely notices the sticky surface against the back of her thighs since his hands have moved onto her shirt, and it’s off a second later, joining her apron on the floor. His mouth dips to her collarbone, then below, breath hot against her skin. Clarke’s head tips back as his hands slide down her sides to grip her waist, pulling her closer.

She’s warm all over, not just because of what they’re doing but because every once in a while she can feel him smile, can feel the same expression take over her too. Hands sliding under his chin, she coaxes him back up to her mouth, where they meet once more. He consumes all her senses; the sensation his strong hands against her heated skin, the taste of him in her mouth, the smell of his soap mixed with coffee grinds, the sounds he makes every so often, somewhere between a laugh and a groan as she catches his bottom lip between her teeth. She’s feeling content in a way she hasn’t felt in a very long time, and she glows with it.

Bellamy’s hands move unhurriedly from her waist down the tops of her thighs, then slip under her skirt and work their way back up again. His thumb brushes the elastic of her underwear, hooks on, tugs gently. As much as Clarke wants him to keep going and pull them straight off, there’s a nagging voice in the back of her mind that has suddenly started babbling on, mostly to remind her where they are.

Slowly, Clarke pulls away, their mouths separating with a wet sound. She takes a second to catch her breath, trying to collect the scattered words to speak. “Bellamy, we’re in a coffee shop.”

The hum of the espresso machine is audible in the background. Bellamy raises an eyebrow at her. “Kinda hard to forget that.”

“And I’m sitting in coffee rings.”

He nudges closer, and it takes all of Clarke’s willpower to drop her mouth, their noses touching instead. Jokingly, he asks, “What, are you saying that doesn’t turn you on?”

“Oh, you know it does,” she replies, and feels his responding chuckle as it resonates from his body into hers. “But I’m not interested in sanitizing the entire shop tonight, and I don’t think you are either.”

“The _entire_ shop?” he clarifies, catching her eye again.

Clarke wets her lips and nods, the motion fluttery. “Yeah, thereabouts.”

He takes a small step backwards, just enough so that they’re no longer pressed up against each other. A small smile plays at his mouth. “So what now?”

“Who’s opening tomorrow?”  
“Monty and Raven.”

Clarke purses her lips as his expression grows daunted, realizing the implications of his words. “They won’t be happy if we leave this place like this.”

“They could just suck it up, don’t you think?” Bellamy says, but they both know they have to clean the shop up if they want to have their jobs come Kane’s return in two days.

Clarke calmly slides off the table and presses a quick kiss to his lips. “You get the brewers, I’ll start on Lizzie.”

Bellamy grumbles a little, but he stoops to grab her shirt and hands it back to her all the same, before turning back to the counter. “This wasn’t exactly how I planned to spend the next hour.”

Clarke smacks him on the ass cheerfully as she walks past him to grab the cafiza. “If you play your cards right, that could be how we spend the hour after this.”

She can feel his eyes on her. The facetious tone is back when he speaks again. “I guess that’d be okay.”

“Then let’s get to work.”

Surprisingly enough, they actually manage to do just that. The time seems to disappear as they clean the shop to perfection, taking a little longer than normal because now and then they’ll cross each other’s paths and get distracted for a few minutes. Clarke spends extra time dusting off the grinder, as though given enough coaxing, she’ll never have to calibrate it again. Bellamy grimaces at the state of the milk pitchers, which they forgot to rinse before closing up and which all have to go through the sanitizer now. By nine, they’re ready to clock out. They head to the back together, Bellamy’s hand snug against her hip.

He has the clipboard in his other hand. “So that’s your drinks review. I don’t want it to seem like I’m playing favorites, but I think you’re my best student yet.”

“Oh my God, am I a teacher’s pet?” Clarke makes a half-hearted attempt to dislodge his hand from it’s place. “I’ve stooped so low.”

“I could fail you if you want, just so it doesn’t look suspicious.”

“Then we’d have to do this all over again, and I don’t think you could trick me into giving you shitty customer service the second time around.”

“I’ve been known to be something of an asshole, I’ll remind you,” he says, and Clarke feels his lips in her hair. “I bet I could do it.”

Clarke snags the clipboard from him to see that he’s already signed his name at the bottom clearing her for full-time work. Softly, she hands it back and says, “Thanks, Bell.”

Her hand goes to unlock the door, and Bellamy releases her momentarily so he can pull the checklist out and give it one last look. Clarke imagines he’s looking, as she had, for the step that says to fall for your coworker. Because, truth be told, the other five steps are easy. Don't be a dick to the customers, clean the Synesso, make a drink fast, memorize the teas, keep everything working properly. This one, on the other hand . . . this one is going to be something else. And Clarke is ready to find out exactly what that is.

The door unlocks with a beep, and her hand drops to the handle.

“It’s probably a good thing we stopped,” Bellamy says conversationally as they push into the back office. “Something Monty said to me before he went back and clocked out kept coming back to me. Something like - ”

“God is watching,” Clarke finishes for him. He laughs.

“Yeah, that.” He signs out on the computer, then steps aside so Clarke can do the same. “You know what I told him? I said, we should give him a reason to keep watching.”

Clarke turns to him, narrowing her eyes. “That’s what I said.”

The smile on his mouth slowly fades as Clarke’s heart skips a beat. There’s a brief moment of clear thought, a single flash of contrition. _Are they really going to do this?_

The answer to that comes in a resounding _yes_ , and another, and another.

Monty isn’t going to be happy tomorrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hopefully this is just in time for the bff awards?? (also hopefully you'll keep this in your thoughts when nominating, maybe in the fluff or modern au sections??, even tho i'm the shittiest person in the world for updates)  
> epilogue to come shortly (and i mean shortly, not, like, seven months later shortly)  
> (also i'm sorry i'm so awkward with anything remotely graphic, i honestly cannot write anything past that)  
> (hey also not to give myself too much credit but there's also a comedic section this year?? *me from 2008 voice* if u laughed, pls nominate!)  
> (that was actually horrible i'm so sorry)


	6. epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i kinda set this up to have a side-pairing that has since fallen out of favor, but i couldn't really do much to change it at this point so i hope y'all are ok

_ONE WEEK LATER_

 

“Last item of business.”

Everyone shifts their stances, just wanting to go home. No one vocalizes the desire; with Kane’s watchful eye on them, they wouldn’t dare. Still, their gazes flicker to phone screens, watches, the computer clock. They closed early for the staff meeting, and it's been nearly an hour - Kane has a habit of being very thorough in his meetings. He looks down at the notes in his hand, and clicks his pen several times.

Across the room, Clarke catches Bellamy’s eye. She uses her eyes to motion at the pen, an unspoken question. Bellamy got the habit from him. He shrugs, the corner of his mouth turning up in a smirk.

Kane lets out a heavy sigh rife with disappointment and flips the notebook shut. “Oh, yes. Bellamy. What did we say about . . . doing certain activities in the back room?”

Bellamy’s taken off guard; he can only give Kane a carefully-constructed look of confusion.

Kane purses his lips, then reiterates, “What was the rule about sex in the back? Can anyone help remind him?”

“No sex in the back room,” Monty pipes up from his seat on top of the tall stack of to-go cup boxes, rocking forward and making the cardboard creak. He shoots Bellamy a smart grin, to which Bellamy rolls his eyes.

He carefully avoids Clarke’s gaze as he says, “I don’t know what you think happened, but whatever it was, it wasn’t me. I haven’t had sex in the back room since the incident.”

There’s a great public outcry at this, everyone jumping to shoot him down. Raven’s voice comes out above the rest. “Well, someone definitely had sex back here, Boy Wonder.”

“It was me.”

The words quiet the employees, and everyone turns to look at Miller, who’s standing unassumingly by the back wall. He gives the room a small smile, arms crossed over his chest, no further defense forthcoming.

Kane blinks, as if unsure how to proceed. He glances at Bellamy, opens his mouth, closes it again. He, like everyone else, is at somewhat of a loss, none more so than Clarke and Bellamy, who exchange furtive looks to the tune of “just go with it.”

Miller steps forward, clearly relishing the surprise. “I also think you can drop the act now.”

Several eyes turn back to Bellamy, but a second later, they realize that Miller’s attention is elsewhere. Directed somewhere above a stack of to-go cup boxes.

“ _Monty_?” Bellamy chokes out through a laugh. “You fucking hypocrite.”

Monty has clearly been blindsided by this announcement, but he doesn’t make any move to deny it. After a second, he shrugs. “Okay, so maybe we had sex in the back.”

Kane stares, and is just about to direct his no-sex-in-the-back spiel at him instead of Bellamy when Lincoln clears his throat. “If we’re admitting things, I’ve broken the rule a few times too.”

Raven glances at Wick, Jasper shifts self-consciously in his seat, and Bellamy can’t hold back a grin. Clarke can’t either at this point, suddenly very decided that she's going to have a really good time working with these people. Kane notices. He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Alright. On the count of three, I want everyone who has _not_ had sex in the back room to raise their hands.”

When he opens his eyes, all he sees is a room full of people sheepishly looking at the floor.

He sucks in a heavy breath, then sets his pen aside. Under his breath, though everyone can hear, he muttered, “Why the hell is my entire staff below the age of twenty-five?”

He takes a moment to think something through, then nods to himself and turns to face his employees. “Here’s my solution: I’m going to put a security camera up in the corner.”

There’s a chorus of complaints, which cuts off when he brings his hand up for silence. “I’m your boss, and you’re going to live with it. Now. I want you to all tell me. What is the rule?”

Everyone grumbles out, “No sex in the back room.”

“ _Good._ ” Kane looks like he’s trying to be angry, but can’t quite manage to hide the beginnings of a smile. “Now get out of here. Apparently I still have work to do.”

Like scolded children, they quickly filter out. Clarke waits by the door for Bellamy, who hooks his arm around her waist before they follow the others out the back. He seems far less affected than the others, probably because he gets that from Kane on a far more regular basis. The evening is warm, the sky a light pink as the sun sets in the distance. They all scatter for their cars, some pairing off.

Before any of them can leave, Bellamy calls out, “That’s called karma, by the way.”

“Fuck off,” Raven shouts back, just as Monty pulls his hand out of Miller’s temporarily to flip Bellamy off with both hands. Miller laughs beside him, and Clarke just tugs on Bellamy’s shirt, guiding him towards far end of the parking lot.

“They’ll get over it soon,” she says.

Bellamy kisses her temple and takes a deep breath. “I know. I just had to say it.”

They keep walking until they reach her car. Clarke digs out her keys and Bellamy goes around the side; she almost has the doors open when he rests his forearms on the roof and jokingly says, “Wait, if the back room’s out, where are we gonna have sex now?”

Clarke pretends to ponder his question. “I’ve heard there’s this thing called a ‘bed’ that some people use.”

“Hey, I’ve got one of those,” he grins. “We should really go check that out.”

Clarke hops in the front seat and Bellamy gets in beside her. She starts the car, and he says, “You remember the way, right?”

She nods, just as he leans over and pulls her mouth to his. A soft, slow kiss that spills gold from their lips and sunlight from their chests. Clarke can see a future flash before her eyes, endless espresso shots and late nights and an apartment to themselves. In that moment, she has never wanted anything more. She moves closer, and he smiles against her mouth.

He tastes like coffee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you all so much for reading


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